Unleashing AI in Accounting and Finance: Boost Your Efficiency Today

Accounting is no longer just about balancing the books, it's about predicting the future. AI is changing finance from automating tasks, detecting fraud, and forecasting cash flow. How can companies and accountants actually use these tools today? Let's explore and accelerate your business. Welcome to the AI Accelerator for Business show where you get the latest strategies, tactics, and information about the business benefits of artificial intelligence. My name is Carl Yeh and I'm joined by my co-host Jeff Bradshaw. Today we're going to talk about AI in accounting as part of our AI in Industry series. Carl, this is an important topic. Obviously, every business, every operation is affected by this. When it comes to accounting, AI is not just about automation, it's about using data intelligently. Businesses can embrace AI in accounting that will ultimately help them reduce manual workload, minimize financial risks, forecast trends, and improve decision making, and really ensure better compliance and even fraud prevention. We've met several accountants already, prospects, clients, and so on. It's interesting where when we talk to them, the key things that they keep coming up with are, I think, the things that AI can solve the most. Because a lot of their jobs are repetitive, especially for every single client. Tax season comes up, a lot of numbers, a lot of Excel, a lot of Google Sheets. The thing is, I can't understand is there's a lot of accountants, but the ones that we've talked to, and maybe we've just talked to the wrong ones, that they haven't fully embraced the capabilities of AI. Well, it's interesting because when you do your presentations, you always say that three things to keep in mind, is the task you're doing repetitive, data-driven, or requires prediction? I think every component of accounting really involves those three. I think that what some of them may be doing, and what we've heard from some of them, is that they're waiting for, they use this program or that program, and they're waiting for those SaaS companies to come out with an AI solution that's going to improve their day-to-day operations. But then on the other hand, we also talk to a lot of accounting departments and firms that are still doing things like transferring data manually from one Excel sheet to the other. You're right, it's surprising that it hasn't had more of an impact. The things that I want to cover today, because there's several that we can look at. The biggest one I see is AI automations, being able to automate a lot of the tasks that one would think is really manual. I know there was one accounting firm where a VP spent, I don't know how many hours in a week, just responding to client emails. I remember when we talked about, hey, you know what, we could automate the ability for whenever an email comes in, you can run it through an automation where the AI can look at the email and provide you a draft response based on other responses. That's a very, very simple automation that would save somebody hours of time. I would think accounting is one of those industries that maybe it's a little bit of a laggard. They have a very, very stringent way of doing things, highly regulated. There's a lot of personal information, obviously financial information, so maybe a little bit tougher for them to actually get on board. If they do even use something, I think Microsoft Copilot or Google Workspace would probably be the default. If you use some of those tools, especially in Excel, you won't get the level of the capabilities, the full capabilities of AI just by using that tool. Well, no, it's interesting you say that, but I think that sometimes maybe there's some accounting firms or accounting departments that are set in their ways, but I also think the big thing is that accounting people are all about the bottom line, and that's the interesting thing with AI is that AI, we talk about improving efficiencies by 10% to 40%. That, to me, will grab the attention of any accountant, again, whether it's with an accounting firm or with an accounting department within a company. I think it's just a matter of education and then being able to understand what's capable, what's possible, and ultimately what the return on investment is for themselves with respect to time and money, but for themselves and also for their clients and for their organizations. So I want to play this little video about the one that we did. It was part of a bigger video, but I want to just showcase some things that you could do with AI automations, and then it should trigger a lot of things for any accounting professionals or accounting firms that's watching this. If we list some of the items that you can do in addition from AI automations, we got like automating data entry and reconciliations. We can do expense and cash flow management, AI-powered financial reporting. How many reports do you need to do on a regular basis as an accountant? And to me, I'm thinking one of our favorite tools that we like to showcase in some of our prospect meetings is the use of, let's say, Claude or ChachiBT to actually build interactive reports. It's a very, very simple thing that I guess I want to show everybody how simple it could work. So as you can see here, this is Claude. And I'm going to put in what I normally like to do is, for any of our presentations, remaxes last year's Q1 report. And usually what I say, what I love about Claude for those who have never used it, and a lot of people that we talked to have only heard of ChachiBT. This is one of OpenAI, the creators of ChachiBT's competitors, Anthropic. And for a lot of people, it is one of the best coding applications out there, but actually has a really good interactive feature called Artifacts, where you can just upload reports, and then it'll build things for you. And in fact, a lot of people have been doing what's called vibe coding, where they would just use Claude and just ask it in natural language and code it. It's not even called vibe coding, sorry, chaos coding, where they would just have an idea, put it into Claude, ask it to run, and then they would just put keep going, keep going, keep going, and it would just keep going. So as you can see here, it's analyzing the article, and you can see how it's putting everything in code and building out that interactive portion that you could always take to whatever client. And another thing you could do is take all the data that you had, and because Claude default doesn't train on your information, so your information is protected from training, you can have full conversations with it, but also can output in different styles that people can understand outside of a major sheets upon sheets of Excel spreadsheets. And the interesting thing with this example is really, I mean, this was a PDF you just pulled off online, a public document off of Remax's investor website. And here you are able to create an interactive presentation in a couple of minutes, which is pretty powerful. So as you can see here, it's pretty quick to build a financial dashboard. And what I asked is to provide a fiscal update and then predictions for the next three quarters. And it's pretty quick where distribution, agent distribution, 2024 forecasting, because it was 2024, and you can continue having the conversation and asking it to adjust and build. You can copy it, you can download the file, you can even publish it. Once you publish it, you can just show the link as well. And I think it's pretty important, Karl, again, like, you know, the fact is, is we've talked that, you know, this kind of a tool that's now available to people a couple of years ago, this would have been a pretty manual process and a laborious process to be able to build an interactive presentation like this, whereas now you can do it in a couple of minutes and have it available for whether it's internal meetings with stakeholders or board meetings or whatever, or with clients, even for an accounting firm to be able to pull these reports up and be able to walk through somebody's year-end report using an interactive presentation like this. Claude doesn't train initially on your data, so it's pretty secure if you look at the, obviously double check and make sure you look at the privacy policy. Another tool that I think would be probably slept on by a lot of accounting firms would be just regular ChatGPT, but it's deep research capability. So for those who haven't actually seen it or have never used it before, you can just go into ChatGPT. Now, to use deep research, you need the plus account, but you only have 10 to work with a month. And what you can do is you can add any type of documents, especially tax documents. Again, just to be cautious, there's a couple of things that you need to do if you want to ensure your data is protected. One is if you go to your settings and you go to data controls, you can actually turn off, so allow your content to be user-trained. You turn that off, that's part one that you can do. Or another thing that you can do is you go to the OpenAI privacy center and you can ask OpenAI to make a privacy request so it doesn't train on any of your content at all. And then you fill out the form and then within 24 hours, you get a form that says that it will not train on anything. Most people don't know that, that there's ways for you to be able to protect your data and then allow you to use a chat GPT for deep research. But when we talk about deep research, again, you can upload so many different things. You can upload all the documents and things like tax research and compliance, financial risk analysis, doing analysis for mergers and acquisitions. Funny enough, we were actually presenting to a municipal police force and one of their officers said the time that this would save just researching financial crimes because they have officers researching or doing that work. There's only so many of them officers available and they won't be able to analyze that level of data just by themselves. But this just gives them that power. And I think a key point here too, is that I think that we encourage people to look at this technology in a positive sense in the fact that rather than putting something up and looking for all of the downfalls and the mistakes it might make, I think the thing is, is look at it for its pluses. I mean, anything you put in here and you ask it to research or analyze or create predictions on, you obviously need to double check it. That's I think the key thing that we always talk about is that AI is not looking to replace any jobs. It's a matter of really enhancing what you do. So you can run it through these models, you know, an analysis, get a report back. If you're analyzing a new market you want to move into and want to run some financials or just check for, you know, things that you may not have noticed yourself in a big report, it's just going to save you that time. And I think that's a key thing. And I think even when it comes to data security and privacy as well, we have a lot of, you know, IT departments just shutting it down and companies go, no, I'm not going to use it because I don't trust it. But there's ways like you just pointed out to be able to protect your data. And again, you know, put up a financial report for a client, but avoid putting in the client name, you know, avoid putting in their address and that type of information. And you could still run it and get the benefits of AI to be able to help, you know, in what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. From then, I want to actually move into the last piece that I want to talk about in terms of accounting is the ability to predict, right? We talk about there's data, there's repetitive work, but then I would imagine accountants would have, if not the most financial information about people and businesses, probably more than they care to deal with. The ability for you to be able to predict using predictive analytics whether it's straight up LLMs or other tools to forecast the future, especially for business, right? So you can have cash flow forecasting, you can analyze past revenue expense patterns to predict future cash flow. You can do fraud detection and anomaly detection, similar to what we've talked about in terms of law enforcement, identify unusual patterns in financial transactions, especially if it's a major business and there's so many data points to analyze. Mere people can't analyze it, but with AI, they can analyze it in seconds. That would have taken, what, weeks for people? Then we're talking about financial planning and budgeting, automatically adjusting budgets based on revenue trends. I know my dad as a financial planner, the amount of data he has to go through, and yes, there are programs, but I know for a fact he doesn't use AI for that specific fact, but I've been really, some of his colleagues have, and they've just cut down the amount of work that they've had to do. And I think the key thing too is again, let's call houses, maybe we should have said this off the top, Carl and I are the furthest thing from financial experts. We are not accountants, but we know what the capabilities are of AI. And I think that, and again, we say this in almost all of our presentations, today is the worst AI is ever going to be. So I think the thing is, is that if you can start to take a look at it from an accounting standpoint and dip your toe in the water and test it out and start to see what's capable, I think you're going to see there's all kinds of opportunities to expand on that from an accounting standpoint. And then as the technology gets better and better, you're going to be level set. You're going to have that background and that knowledge and be able to be familiar with it so that you're able to adapt a lot quicker. I think one of the first places that accountants should take a look at, and we encourage this for any businesses, do a maybe mini discovery in your business, whether it's a small accounting firm, most likely a medium-sized or even large accounting firms, what are some of the things that you do on a regular basis, weekly, daily, monthly, bi-weekly, quarterly, that is repetitive, most likely data-driven, and involves prediction. And start there, look at the things that drive you, we call it the eye roll test, that makes you eye roll every single time, that prevents you from completing the most important work. So what are those things? And then from there, see if you can 10% to 40% improve your productivity, improve your efficiency by using AI, just for those repetitive tasks. And I bet you, if you sat down with your team for even an hour, an hour and a half, just to talk about it, you'll probably come up with 20, 30, 50 different things that would drive everyone in your company up the wall, because you have to keep doing it, especially from an accounting perspective. We've heard so many times from accounting firms, some of the mundane stuff that they have to do, just like drag and drop Excel to another Excel, look at reports, create reports. What are some of those things that AI can take advantage for you today? I think the other thing, Carl, too, is there's other tools as well, and we've done this with HR, but I mean, there is the opportunity to create something like a custom GPT on the tax law, so that when you've got something like the Tax Act in Canada, and it's constantly changing, it's a massive amount of information, you could also use AI to help everybody in your firm or your accounting department to be able to reference that kind of information. And you don't even have to create a custom GPT, you can go to Notebook LM, you can do the exact same thing, and you can have a fun podcast. If you ever want to listen to 20 minutes worth of tax information, which I think those in that profession probably enjoy, I know I wouldn't at all. That's what we have the accountants around. Exactly, exactly. So for accountants, a couple of things for you to think about. Could AI automations, maybe AI deep research tools, improve your financial decision-making for your business or for your clients? And which part of your accounting process is still too manual and should be automated? Think about that. Let us know in the comment section. But more importantly, start thinking about how AI can help solve some of those issues. Learn more about how to use AI for industries by watching these videos here. Enjoy today's episode. Want to learn how AI can impact your business? Then please subscribe to this channel. Thanks for watching, and we'll catch you in the next episode.