> nearly as accurate as a human book keeper

Anything to avoid using the metric system.

Though seriously, what is this metric? Why would I care if an LLM is accurate as a human bookkeeper? Humans aren't exactly known for perfect recall.

> They've done studies, you know. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

Interesting write-up. Having been a bookkeeper a long time ago, I'm not too surprised at this being susceptible to automation by an LLM backed system.

It seems also that the classes of error they encountered could be handled by improved skills/knowledge base access on the fine points of relevant tax legislation.

The important part for their software ofc is, will they take responsibility for the output if HMRC come calling? Without that users are adopting the risk which they may not be keen to do (dealing with HMRC is not fun), with that it could be a very nice saving for a lot of small companies (and bad for the employees of a lot of accountancy firms)

This doesn't surprise me at all. You can really constrain this problem, give very narrow context, and get pretty reliable and reproducible results.

I've gotten very good results with some vibe-coded deepseek book keeping. https://github.com/traverseda/beansync

Parses emails or other sources, extracts numbers, correlates different transactions, web search, asks questions, stores notes (regex based, very simple).

The hard part is getting good data, I'm sure that lexus nexus or whoever can get API access to my bank account and all my credit cards, but I can't. Email turned out to be the best way for most of my providers. Managed to avoid 2factor auth so far, but it will suck when I need it.

Oh, I'm actively doing this at the moment. FreeAgent grabs my transactions from Wise already, and then I give it [Claude Code, in fact] a folder of PDFs to attach to my invoices, including figuring out VAT, and it's uploading what it found using the FreeAgent API. My accountant hasn't complained yet, and it seems considerably more accurate than when my wife was doing it.

Quiet plug for https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre which I use for all my little projects like this.

I'd be scared shitless to even try something like this. There is just a pretty website, a video, and a blog post. No info on the founders, I can't find anything on LinkedIn and a company Vineyard Finance LTD that was incorporated last year.

We're all unhinged about the data we're giving LLMs but here I'd draw the line. I'd rather keep paying for the small amount I pay to have my accounts done.

The company I work for, Digits, has been regularly updating our AI-vs-human bookkeeper benchmark. Look at page 8 -- many models are nearly as accurate as a human bookkeeper

https://digits.com/downloads/beyond-the-hype-evaluating-llms...

It's not hard to imagine that will be able to do as good a job as a human accountant in the not too distant future.

It's also not hard to imagine tax authorities using AI to audit everyone's tax returns every year.

We sure live in interesting times.