Essence Of Artificial Intelligence In Accounting

Artificial Intelligence – A Game changer for Accounting Sector

AI is empowering Accounting Sector to focus on the value-based businesses while attracting more customers and boosting the revenue within less time. Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Machine Learning (ML) can decipher data on multiple sources and extract actionable insights out of complicated scenarios significantly reducing errors which were earlier made manually.

Implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a dream come true for most of the accountants, with off-the-shelf AI- driven accounting applications available in the market, which do not need any software expertise. The accounting firms can easily benefit from these smarter AI solutions and deliver better service to their clients. Several major accounting software vendors (Xero, Sage and Intuit) are offering facilities to automate repetitive accounting tasks such as bookkeeping, data categorization and eliminate manual errors.

Automating Bookkeeping – Stepping Stone to Accounting

Automating the tedious process of recording each and every transaction time to time and producing financial reports and statements is a stepping stone to accounting industry. Applying AI in bookkeeping can reduce the enormous data – entry work and deliver more accurate reports without any errors. There is an AI-driven application that can spontaneously capture the data from any kind of invoice and enter only the required information in the accounting system.

Accounts Payable & Receivable

One of the noteworthy roadblocks is defaulting on accounts payable and receivable.

Considering a scenario, when a business charges you for services and sends an invoice to your company. This invoice is directed to the accounts payable. A lot of times managing and maintaining a track of payments can be a massive time taking task. An AI-driven application can exclude all the burden and retain a healthy cash flow. The Accounts Payable process is streamlined to speed up tallying the invoices with purchase orders and payment approvals to avoid any payment delays or overpayments.

Manually this process ideally takes 5-10 minutes per invoice, with AI the same job can be done in 2 minutes, on an average 7 minutes per invoice can be saved.

Categorizing huge volumes of Data

Data categorization is another important barrier can be addressed by putting AI into effect. Data Bots can now decide and classify all the information from different sources into their respective accounts by themselves. The Data Bots notify and organize data coming from same source into their corresponding categories. For example: if there is a monthly phone bill and mobile phone bill coming from the same source, the bot can automatically recognize that the bills are of different nature and will place them under different chart of accounts. The AI-driven application can keep track of Vendor name, Invoice number, Payment due date and Amount due and categorize the data in general ledger with no human interference to start the bill creation process.

The procedural changes that AI is making might sooner or later spark some controversy about the security of the this transition. The final approval for all the AI driven jobs is still given by accounting professionals to maintain the control over sensitive data.

This new wave of technological innovation is endlessly hitting the shores of the Accounting industry, which was much needed for quite a long time. Though still not adopted completely but the big change is actually happening!

To read our previous article about Accounting and AI check our blog