TALKING business
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Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) and automation have brought the accounting profession to a point of pivotal change and it ’ s about to revolutionise the way that accountants work .
AI is already good at automating repetitive accountancy tasks , which increases accuracy and efficiency , and helps firms to discover hidden insights and trends that affect their clients ’ businesses . It can automatically upload documents , understand entries and classify them using the right accounting codes .
This has allowed accountants to do more with fewer resources and has freed up time and energy for creativity when it comes to analysing and interpreting data to extract real value for clients .
Many professionals are excited by the benefits that AI can offer . In fact , according to the Sage Practice of Now report , the majority of South African respondents ( 82 %) agreed that they need to increase the pace of technology adoption to stay competitive .
Now , as advances in AI and Machine Learning ( ML ) pick up the pace , three additional benefits have emerged : invisible accounting , continuous auditing and active insights .
Invisible accounting
At the beginning of 2020 , over half ( 54 %) of South African accountants were moving away from traditional service models and were reinventing their core technologies , recruitment approaches and skillsets to offer customers an end-to-end consulting service .
They were able to do this because AI had eliminated repetitive tasks from the daily workload and increased the amount of readily available data and , therefore , intelligence to understand the current health and direction of their clients ’ businesses .
Take bank rules from Sage as an example . By applying rules and ML to banking transactions , accountants can seamlessly bring banking account information into the accounting system to automate transaction reconciliation and processing . This means the books are always balanced and the account status is updated in real-time .
Peterjohn Bishop , Vice-President , Partners , Accountants and Alliances , Africa and Middle East , Sage
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AS THE VOLUME OF ONLINE TRANSACTIONAL DATA INCREASES , SO DOES THE POTENTIAL FOR FINANCIAL FRAUD , MANUAL ACCOUNTING ERRORS AND DISHONEST PAYMENTS .
They can create their own rules or use those automatically generated through ML and AI to improve business productivity and save time . We ’ ve calculated that , if the average manual transaction takes 20 seconds to capture , bank rules can save a business more than five years of manual data entry time .
And , the more you use bank rules , the faster and more efficient the system becomes , because it continuously learns from inputs and user feedback .
All this happens in the background – hence , invisible accounting . AI automatically www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
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