Today, AI is being used for image recognition, object
identification, detection, classification and automated geophysical feature
detection. These are underlying tasks that once required the input of a human.
Focusing on how artificial intelligence will impact
accountants, AI will very soon help you to automate much of the routine and
repetitive activities that are undertaken on a daily, weekly or annual basis.
It will also help you to:
Empower quick decision-making
Create smart insights
Examine huge quantities of data with ease.
With this in mind, here are five examples of how ai could be
useful for your accountancy firm over the coming years.
1. Predictive and forecasting solutions
With AI integrated into the software, you
will be able to provide a comprehensive and accurate insight for your clients
without the usual “manual heavy lifting” and number crunching behind report
creation. On a day-to-day basis, being able to quickly and easily access
up-to-date and accurate reports and forecasts can help you form a closer and
more useful relationship with your clients.
This revolution will be empowered by one of
the cornerstones of AI today: machine learning.
This is the ability of software to
essentially program itself based on the data it encounters. The software is
able to learn from what you do with data and can make its own suggestions for
humans, if not act entirely autonomously. Machine learning is everywhere. It
allows mobile phones to enhance predictive text, use speech recognition, create
route suggestions when navigating, and suggest places you might want to visit
when you reach your destination. At companies worldwide, 77% of businesses
already say they’re completely or very reliant on machine learning technologies.
2. Smart assistants
Are you an accountant who, during crunch
time when seemingly every client is sending through their accounts, considers
turning off your phone or email so you can get some work done? You’re probably
not alone. Fortunately, smart assistants might be able to give you a helping
hand. They can form the first line of customer contact and might even be able
to provide clients with the information they need, such as details about their
current tax liability.
3. Automatic tagging and allocation of transactions
The next two areas where AI will help your
accountancy practice are also enabled by machine learning. This will save you
time by correctly tagging transactions and assigning them to the right ledger
account. Put simply, your accounting software will learn from previous tagging
decisions that are typically made according to rules that the accountant is
aware of. Some of these rules are intuitive but others can be surprisingly
complex, at least from a computer’s point of view. Over the coming years, the
ability of technology to discover these rules and predictively plan will help
to remove a significant component of your daily workload.
4. Anomaly detection
Computers love data, of course, and when
machine learning is applied to massive amounts of data—such as the yearly
ledgers of a large company—then there are clear benefits.You will be able to
discover anomalies that may exist, and the process will be much quicker and
take significantly less effort.
If an audit is required, for example, it
will be possible to audit all the data rather than merely a sample, yet without
the huge resources typically required for what’s traditionally considered a
“full” audit.
Optical character recognition (OCR) isn’t
new but AI enhances its accuracy significantly and opens it to new usage
scenarios.
5. OCR solutions
While it’s always been possible to extract
information automatically from documents, this required a human to point out to
the OCR software where the data was located—something that also meant the
document layout couldn’t be altered without further instruction.
So what next for AI and accountants?
How will we get all these wonderful
AI-enabled benefits? Well, the good news is you probably won’t have to do very
much. While in the past you might have expected to buy an add-on software
package to gain revolutionary new functionality, the kind of tools discussed
above will more than likely start to appear over the coming years in the
software you’re using now. Some of it, such as bank account reconciliation,
might already be present in your firm’s accounting and client management
software—and you might not even be aware.
All you might have noticed is that things
just got a little bit easier when the software appeared to get that little bit
smarter. This is the shape the revolution will take—many small increments,
rather than an overnight change.
It simply means being aware of what’s
common-sense good practice as far as technology goes and ensuring solutions
such as cloud computing are adopted within your practice.
This gives you all the benefits available
today while ensuring you’re prepared for the future.
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