New ask Hacker News story: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging automation target
AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging automation target
2 by bmadduma | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Working on automating small business finance (bookkeeping, reconciliation, basic reporting). One thing I keep noticing: compared to programming, accounting often looks like the more automatable problem: It’s rule-based Double entry, charts of accounts, tax rules, materiality thresholds. For most day-to-day transactions you’re not inventing new logic, you’re applying existing rules. It’s verifiable The books either balance or they don’t. Ledgers either reconcile or they don’t. There’s almost always a “ground truth” to compare against (bank feeds, statements, prior periods). It’s boring and repetitive Same vendors, same categories, same patterns every month. Humans hate this work. Software loves it. With accounting, at least at the small-business level, most of the work feels like: normalize data from banks / cards / invoices apply deterministic or configurable rules surface exceptions for human review run consistency checks and reports The truly hard parts (tax strategy, edge cases, messy history, talking to authorities) are a smaller fraction of the total hours but require humans. The grind is in the repetitive, rule-based stuff.
2 by bmadduma | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Working on automating small business finance (bookkeeping, reconciliation, basic reporting). One thing I keep noticing: compared to programming, accounting often looks like the more automatable problem: It’s rule-based Double entry, charts of accounts, tax rules, materiality thresholds. For most day-to-day transactions you’re not inventing new logic, you’re applying existing rules. It’s verifiable The books either balance or they don’t. Ledgers either reconcile or they don’t. There’s almost always a “ground truth” to compare against (bank feeds, statements, prior periods). It’s boring and repetitive Same vendors, same categories, same patterns every month. Humans hate this work. Software loves it. With accounting, at least at the small-business level, most of the work feels like: normalize data from banks / cards / invoices apply deterministic or configurable rules surface exceptions for human review run consistency checks and reports The truly hard parts (tax strategy, edge cases, messy history, talking to authorities) are a smaller fraction of the total hours but require humans. The grind is in the repetitive, rule-based stuff.
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