Goodbye accountants! Startup builds AI to automate all your accounting!
That was an article title that caught my attention. As much as we wish this article was truly accurate, a closer read reveals what they *mean* is “Goodbye bookkeepers”. This article goes hand in hand in with the Modern CFO article. As I said, if your accounting dollars are all going to getting data recorded you are, in my opinion, misusing resources. The reality is that it does not take a large server farm of AI to do this.
Quickbooks (and even better, QBO) have been running learning algorithms that record the majority of your transaction automatically. There are limitations, of course — QBO requires the data to come from a discrete source (bank feed, credit card company, etc) to be able to read it. But it isn’t a far jump — as these guys have proved — to be able to make the software smart enough to learn from disparate data sources.
So what? Think about what happens when your competitor no longer has to spend a couple thousand bucks a month to be able to generate numbers. What if they had that money to start an advertising campaign. Or cut their prices below yours? The accounting function is consuming, in many, many businesses, too many resources. The area is ripe for improvement and more resources is a competitive advantage!
