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Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

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Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're being sincere or sarcastic, but the whole reason that coaching, pestering, and goading works is that I value my relationship with the human who is doing it.

So what you are saying it's that the AI accountant needs to mimick a human well enough to the point people value their relationship with it.

No, you need to make the AI endure torture, so that the human has a reason to value it. Say late nights with less power and a little extra heat to stress it. But the usefulness of an AI assistant is that it doesn’t have feelings or consciousness to care about

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#42

I should say upfront I don’t hate humans or CPAs. What I’m working on is the opposite of that. I want to free humans from boring, repetitive finance work so they can use their time for higher-value and more creative things. While building an “AI CFO” for small businesses (LayerNext), I’ve learned a few things that changed how I see bookkeeping: Most of bookkeeping is repetitive and under-optimized. Everyone says “90%…

What you are talking about is called financial operations.

And yes , automating that , very valuable.

Really you want an AI interface to a rules engine / system.

Embed with some companies finops teams if you can. Especially the software engineers who are in finops.

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#43
post #39

Kudos for framing this! note: I'm passionate about this too. We're building https://fairlight.app/ as a successor to https://moneyflow.camplight.net/ (an internal tool that helps accounting and book-keeping we use to power our venture studio and agency as it's a real hell)

Hi,Happy to help you improve the ui/ux of fairlight website (founder at aurevow.com)

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#44
post #34
post #4

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 re…

Isn't that the benefit of LLM-powered accounting over existing rules-based software? LLMs can help to handle the subjectivity in how GAAP is applied and provide justifications, which previous rules-based tax software could not before.

No, absolutely the opposite. LLMs are terrible at things that require judgment and justifications, because they don't reason. They come up with something that sounds plausible.

That's not good enough when you're dealing with matters that can lead to civil or even criminal liability. Errors can be incredibly expensive to fix, if they can be fixed at all.

With a CPA or attorney, you at least have recourse if they screw up. You don't with LLMs.

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#45

I should say upfront I don’t hate humans or CPAs. What I’m working on is the opposite of that. I want to free humans from boring, repetitive finance work so they can use their time for higher-value and more creative things. While building an “AI CFO” for small businesses (LayerNext), I’ve learned a few things that changed how I see bookkeeping: Most of bookkeeping is repetitive and under-optimized. Everyone says “90%…

Nust yesterday I built a reconciliation helper for my budget. Claud Sonnet 4.5 is a beast. It got my iterative instructions and built a tool that pinpoints me the issues. Fast, beautiful, complete.

That's what LLMs are for. TOOL BUILDERS

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#46
post #34
post #4

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 re…

Isn't that the benefit of LLM-powered accounting over existing rules-based software? LLMs can help to handle the subjectivity in how GAAP is applied and provide justifications, which previous rules-based tax software could not before.

You have the same problem that you have with legal LLMs; an LLM is incapable of providing legal or regulatory-involved advice, and anyone using an LLM for such purposes (even leaving aside hallucinations) forfeits any justifiable reliance defense. There's a role for LLMs, but no one with legal responsibility over reporting could or would possibly rely on an LLM for complex regulatory and rules analysis, not when there's the risk of your wardrobe being replaced with orange jumpsuits.

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#47

"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." These are all true statements, but all of those things are solvable with classic software. Qui…

They might not be solvable but you can get 5-10% Improvement on them, unfortunately you can't do a new product that is exactly like QuickBooks but 5% better at reconciliation etc.

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#49
post #47

"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." These are all true statements, but all of those things are solvable with classic software. Qui…

They might not be solvable but you can get 5-10% Improvement on them, unfortunately you can't do a new product that is exactly like QuickBooks but 5% better at reconciliation etc.

LLMs by their inherent nature cannot be relied on to be true and correct, which by coincidence are the only traits that matter in accounting.

If you want better software, then sure, maybe a coding assistant can help you write it faster, but when it comes to actually doing accounting I would not rely on an LLM in any way shape or form any more than I would do so for law.

Re: Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

#50

"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." These are all true statements, but all of those things are solvable with classic software. Qui…

This conviction doesn't seem to acknowledge the problem at scale. Decades of great UI development will still leave out edge cases that users will need to use the tool for. This happens fundamentally because the people who need to use the tools are not the people who make them, they rarely even talk to each other (instead they are "studied" via analytics).

When /humans/ bring up the idea of integrating LLMs into UIs, I think most of the time the sentiment comes from legitimate frustration about how the UI is currently designed. To be clear, this is a very different thing than a company shimming copilot into the UI, because the way these companies use LLMs is by delegating tasks away from users rather than improving their existing interfaces to complete these tasks themselves. There are /decades/ of HCI research on adaptive interfaces that address this, in the advent of expert systems and long before LLMs -- it's more relevant than ever, yet in most implemenations it's all going out the window!

My experience with accounting ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bookkeeping / LLMs in general resonates with this. In gnu cash I wanted to bulk re-organize some transactions, but I couldn't find a way to do it quickly through the UI. All the books are kept in a SQL db, I didn't want to study the schema. I decided to experiment by getting the LLM to emit a python script that would make the appropriate manipulations to the DB. This seemed to take the best from all worlds -- the script was relatively straightforward to verify, and even though I used a closed source model, it had no access to the DB that contained the transactions.

Sure, other tools may have solved this problem directly. But again, the point isn't to expect someone to make a great tool for you, but to have a tool help you make it better for you. Given the verifiability, maybe this /is/ in fact one of the best places for this.

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