How AI Is Changing Accounting – From Your Favorite Orange County Bookkeeper

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived in the accounting field and it’s huge! AI is helping to streamline the Orange County bookkeeper‘s accounting tasks, find patterns in data you can take action on, and generally making workflow more efficient. Here are just a few places we’re seeing AI impact accounting.

Transaction Coding

Most systems have incorporated some form of machine learning into transaction coding. When bank feeds are imported, each transaction needs to be coded to be recorded in the Chart of Accounts.  Class, tracking codes, and other custom data may need to be added as well. Rules can be set so that the accounting application can pre-code the transactions; in this case, the accountant simply approves or corrects the entry.

Invoice Fetching

It starts with a picture of a receipt. Invoice fetching applications can turn pixels into data using sophisticated OCR (optical character recognition). This data is then turned into a business transaction that can be imported into an accounting system.

Auditing

The books of many government agencies, non-profits, and large businesses need to be audited on a regular basis. Auditing is an expensive process. Smart programs can review a company’s data and assess where the risks and anomalies are so that the audit program can be modified to focus on the more important parts. This reduces risk and cost for everyone involved.

Accounts Payable

Artificial Intelligence can help speed up many bookkeeping services Orange County processes like: matching purchase orders, packing slips, and invoices so that accounts payable tasks are streamlined.  It can also automate approvals and look for duplicate invoices to avoid over-payments.

Accounting Tasks That Are Clerical

 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a platform that allows users to create automation without involving the IT department. Think Excel macros or Zapier on steroids. Any workflow with a mind-numbing set of clerical steps is a candidate for RPA.

AI allows accountants and Orange County bookkeeper to spend less time on routine tasks and more time on higher-level analysis. As AI becomes more affordable for small businesses, everyone will benefit from this long-term trend.