Lots of this is already being done (and using computers to check books balanced predates latest gen AI by some decades). But of course what accountants actually get paid for is tax strategy, edge cases, messy history and talking to authorities (or at least having their stamp of approval on it if the authorities come calling). There's plenty of market for writing software to automate aspects of invoice reconciliation or monitoring accounts for exceptions, but competition already exists...

If you look through the documentation for something like Quickbooks, most of what you're discussing is already there.

If you want complex custom rules, and integration with other systems, you're looking at something like SAP.

I’m an accountant (CPA, CMA, Big 4), and while there’s some truth in what you’re saying, you’re significantly underestimating the complexity of applying GAAP, or even tax law. What you’re describing is really bookkeeping, not accounting, and there are plenty of tools that already automate that.

There’s a lot of subjectivity in how GAAP is applied and interpreted - creating accruals, deciding when revenue should be recorded, blah blah.

This is roughly what my startup is doing, automating financials.

We didn't pick this because it was super technical, but because the financial team is the closest team to the CEO which is both overstaffed and overworked at the same time - you have 3-4 days of crunch time for which you retain 6 people to get it done fast.

This was the org which had extremely methodical smart people who constantly told us "We'll buy anything which means I'm not editing spreadsheets during my kids gymnastics class".

The trouble is that the UI that each customer wants has zero overlap with the other, if we actually added a drop-down for each special thing one person wanted, this would look like a cockpit & no new customer would be able to do anything with it.

The AI bit is really making the required interface complexity invisible (but also hard to discover).

In a world where OpenAI is Intel and Anthropic is AMD, we're working on a new Excel.

However, to build something you need to build a high quality message passing co-operating multi-tasking AI kernel & sort of optimize your L1 caches ("context") well.

It is already quite automated to my knowledge.

And it is a very poor fit for moderm LLM based AI. Because accuracy. No mistakes or hallucinations allowed.

As others have said, the actual accounting part of accounting is pretty well automated already. Spend some time with LLM's, though, and you'll quickly realize their non-determinism is a huge hindrance for this kind of work.

The hard part of accounting, and the part that takes all the time, is the reconciling... which can't be automated.

Everything else has been mostly automated since the 90s.

Accounting rules are also not as discrete as programming. There is a lot of discretion. Accounting is basically law with numbers and is corresponding just as difficult/ impossible for LLMs to master.

Most women don't think AI is sexy.

My friend works in corporate accounting. He said his company is outsourcing a bunch of accounting functions and laying people off (I don't know the specifics). They are outsourcing to India and the outsourced company is already using AI for stuff compared to his company that isn't. He thinks many companies are going to outsource.