What AI can and cannot do in accountancy

Ask a vendor what AI does for an accountancy practice and you get a demonstration.
Ask what you must still check afterwards and the answer shrinks.

What it does today

Assembly comes off a practice first.
Not judgement, not advice, but the gathering and arranging that happens before anybody qualified looks at anything.

• —Chasing records. The same five clients every January, the same missing receipts.
  This sits closer to a scheduling problem than a professional one.
• —Assembling a year-end pack. Pulling the ledger, the bank and last year’s file into one place, in the order your reviewer reads them.
• —Reconciling what arrives. A client sends a photograph of a receipt and one line of explanation.
  Turning that into a coded line stays mechanical, and it eats the day.
• —Drafting. An agent drafts a VAT return or a year-end set from the records, with every figure traceable to its source.
  Somebody still checks it and files it.

None of that replaces your ledger.
An agent reads what already sits in Xero or QuickBooks, your inbox and your document store, then acts through them.
A tool that asked you to migrate would be a worse version of software you own.

What it must not do

The line here is not difficulty.
The line is whether a wrong answer shows.
Reconciling a bank line has a right answer, so an error surfaces at once.
Deciding materiality does not, and that error surfaces in an enquiry.

One more category deserves naming, and practices get it wrong.
Work you would check line by line anyway does not repay automating.
If checking costs what the work cost, the effort moved rather than went.

What makes it safe

Everything above rests on one property.
A tool that invents a plausible figure creates liability, and saved time never compensates.
Ask any vendor about these three directly.

• —Every figure cites its source. A reviewer sees the document or ledger line behind it and checks it in seconds.
• —Nothing sensitive moves without approval. Anything that leaves the practice or changes a record waits for a person.
• —The platform logs every action. Your own file needs it, and an enquiry will eventually ask who did what.

Where to start

Not with software.
Add up where the hours go, by role, for one month.
Most practices have never done this, and the answer surprises the partners.

Then take the most repetitive job on that list with one clear right answer, and only that.
One job done properly teaches you more than any demonstration.

Our page for accountancy firms shows this applied across a whole practice.
If you want the hours counted and costed before you commit, the AI opportunity audit does that.
Most of them end without us building anything.