By your definition accounting is budgeting, and choosing what to budget about, and picking the tools to budget with. It operates within constraints, as programming does, and those constraints likely vary from company to company (inverted compared to programming, perhaps---it seems like a larger company may have more scenarios to run, a smaller company fewer, and thus there may be more room for the kind of creativity you describe at a larger company). Even within a tool you can make a million stylistic choices on how to present the information around your budgets and payments to enable the rest of your organization to make decisions.
Programming itself is also not limited to developers. That should be self-evident in that spreadsheets are the go-to tool for so many non programmers, and they are at heart accessible programs. In that sense, it is programming that is a creative endeavor, not development or coding.
Last but not least, the most creative (and valuable) part of programming is arguably problem definition and problem solving. I would argue these two things are shared, in one way or another, across most jobs and careers.
Programming itself is also not limited to developers. That should be self-evident in that spreadsheets are the go-to tool for so many non programmers, and they are at heart accessible programs. In that sense, it is programming that is a creative endeavor, not development or coding.
Last but not least, the most creative (and valuable) part of programming is arguably problem definition and problem solving. I would argue these two things are shared, in one way or another, across most jobs and careers.