What AI handles well
- Suggesting categories for routine transactions, especially recurring ones.
- Reading receipts and bills into your accounting software, where your software supports it.
- Explaining reports. Paste a profit and loss summary (no account numbers) and ask what changed and why it might matter.
- Spreadsheet work: formulas, cleaning up exports, matching lists.
- Drafting messages: invoice reminders, vendor queries, questions for your accountant.
- Summarizing what you need to gather at month-end or tax time.
What needs your review
- Categorizations, especially unusual, mixed-use or large transactions. AI guesses from patterns, and patterns can be wrong.
- Bank and card reconciliation. A person should confirm the books match the statements.
- Anything that pays, moves or writes off money.
- Customer and vendor records, such as duplicates, merges and deletions.
What still needs a bookkeeper or CPA
- Tax filings and tax positions: what's deductible, depreciation, entity questions.
- Payroll setup and payroll tax.
- Sales tax: where you owe it and how it's filed.
- Year-end adjustments and anything a lender, investor or auditor will rely on.
- Cleaning up messy books. AI can help a professional work faster, but it shouldn't guess at months of uncategorized history.
Keep good records whatever tools you use. The IRS explains how long to keep business records, and AI-generated summaries don't replace the underlying documents.
Owner examples, with prompts
Here's a summary of income and expenses for three jobs last quarter (no account numbers): [paste]. Which job had the lowest margin, and what are the likely reasons I should check? List questions to ask my bookkeeper.
Here's my profit and loss for the last two months: [paste]. Explain in plain English what changed, which expenses grew fastest, and three questions I should ask my accountant.
This is a CSV export of sales by product: [paste or upload]. Group the products into categories, total each category by month, and flag any rows that look like duplicates or refunds.
I'm meeting my CPA about year-end. My business is a [type and structure]. Make a checklist of documents and questions to bring, based on this list of what I have: [paste].
Using the AI in your accounting software
QuickBooks, Xero and other accounting platforms have been adding AI features. What's available depends on your plan and changes often, so check your own account rather than a review site. Start with categorization suggestions and receipt capture, and keep a person reviewing every week for the first couple of months.
Cautions
- Don't paste bank account numbers, card details, Social Security numbers or employee pay records into general AI tools. See our AI policy for a data list.
- AI can be confidently wrong with numbers. Check totals against your software.
- Tax answers from AI are not tax advice. Use them to prepare better questions for your accountant.
Your business's AI plan looks at how your books, invoicing and reporting run today and shows where AI can safely save hours, and where it shouldn't be used, with tools that fit your accounting software.