How accounting in the era of AI is driving business success

The advancement of AI is ushering in a new era—one that is transforming how to run a successful small business.

As an accountant or bookkeeper, these developments bring a new opportunity to shape how you serve your clients and become a driver of their business success.

To demonstrate the potential of AI, we asked coffee chain Grind Founder, David Abrahamovitch, to share the many ways he’s using it.

From empowering his finance team, to enhancing the way he works with his accountant.

Hear his story here:

This article will discuss some of the key advantages of generative AI and automation, and how they can help you perform faster and at a higher level.

The daily Grind

You were up late last night chasing spreadsheets.

You woke up to emails pinging, the monthly close is creeping already.

Your client has a potential investor keen to get in early.

You need a few months’ worth of data to show her, so you stay late, pulling all the spreadsheets together to write a compelling report to send to all the stakeholders.

Providing guidance around your clients’ finances means everything’s on you, from managing the small crises, to creating the big picture insights.

With that, comes an astonishing amount of manual admin.

From collating invoices to writing reports, you need access to information that changes daily, sometimes hourly.

You client-accountant relationship is essential to this process, if they delay sending you any information you need, deadlines can be missed and reputations tainted.

That’s where AI and automation can step in as two tools that can boost your productivity to take you from stressed out to strategic mastermind.

Become a strategic powerhouse

You’ve heard the grand promises about how AI is the future for small businesses; you’ve seen some impressive demos.

But what can specific business finance models do to help you manage your clients’ financials more effectively in the real world?

And when there are more than just big ideas at stake, how does automation and generative AI fit in?

While automation makes life easier by automating process steps to get you from point A to point B faster and with less error, generative AI is your pocket assistant, proactively bringing things to your attention and helping you drive strategy.

They work best together, in synergy.

Here’s what advantages automation could bring to your practice:

• Automation consolidates several manual steps and takes them off your to-do list. For example, software could compile all your client’s invoice data into a report, something you’d normally have to do manually, but this is done automatically.
• Invoices can be recorded and sorted easily, shaving hours of time off your monthly close.
• Or, it could help your clients to chase late payments, for example, as automation takes care of email reminders after invoices reach 10, 20, or 30 days unpaid.

For David, the shift to using both, came when he realised generative AI could enhance how he works with his accountant.

“I realized I couldn’t get that information or the way that the accountant needed it, and it ended up just being like 50 or 60 individual PDFs”. He used AI to consolidate everything he needed, “In 2 minutes, I had [it] perfectly formatted I was like, okay, wow this is amazing!”

This lessened the burden on his accountant and gave them both time back to focus on more meaningful work.

While automation can funnel data to the right place, generative AI can:

• analyse it
• add any relevant external input
• give you insights
• suggest contributions to your strategy
• automatically compile reports based on previous history or need

This puts you at the heart of your client’s strategy, because you arrive prepared with up-to-date data.

Your role as trusted advisor is supported by the speed and agility having access to the current state of play gives you.

To get the best out of both tools, you should choose a financial management system that integrates both, this creates a single source of truth, essential when ensuring compliance and managing risk.

Having this in one place will elevate your client support to the next level, allowing you to be proactive and strategic.

What do generative AI and automation really mean for your practice?

Generative AI and automation can work together to consolidate financial data efficiently, which will reduce your administrative burden by hours, if not days.

To do this, consider the following:

• Ensure your AI software understands specific standards, insights, and your industry, as not all tools will be tailored to the financial sector.
• Find financial management software that has AI and automation capabilities built in so you can get the double benefit of both.

Some examples of AI and automation use in your day-to-day would be:

• Asking AI to analyse your client’s business financials and create a forecast report.
• AI flags to you if here’s something odd about your accounts payable or receivable process, as it’s always running in the background, day and night, monitoring transactions.
• AI could tell you if you need to follow certain compliance procedures in a new country your clients are about to sell in, so you can employ the correct accounting standards.

Focus your free time

Instead of a day spent endlessly dealing with manual admin of your clients’ financial data, outsourcing these multiple time-draining steps to AI and automation will give you and your finance teams more time back.

Time you can use for building relationships, exploring new ideas, and finding new ways to develop your practice, even when you’re growing fast.

Consolidating your clients’ financial data makes it accessible in one place and gives you a tech stack that works for your clients’ specific needs.

With your new-found free time you can:

• improve other areas of your practice
• explore a broad overview for at-a-glance client finances
• enjoy access to all the details in a few clicks
• delegate tasks easier with multi-level access and customized reporting
• reposition your skills as strategic rather than manual

David continues, “once you go through the process of linking all of these systems together and getting it into a big database, the opportunities you then get to go and interrogate that data are amazing.”

The next stage to consider

Insights from this year’s Accountex event in London, show how generative AI and automation are inspiring new ways of working.

These technologies are redefining accounting in the era of AI, which will continue to expand for years to come.

Exploring it now will not only let you see immediate benefits, time savings, and gain better insights, but will deliver the ability to be an agile practice, even as you grow.

David has seen the real benefits of using generative AI and automation tools, even within his own finance team who now have more time to focus on creatively solving business problems and strengthening relationships.

 “They can then spend their time partnering with other parts of the business and looking at the data rather than producing it, or getting involved in too much admin.”

Final thoughts

As an accountant, generative AI and automation tools can fast-track data output and run through more efficient financial management processes than you can manually do on your own.

To discover what generative AI and automation can do for your practice and client finances in more depth, sign up to the latest newsletter, or explore more tips and insights for accountants and finance teams here.