The technology around us is rapidly changing, and we are starting to witness a strong emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation in our day to day lives.
Consider some of the below and how they have evolved:
- Supermarket Checkout – now in the form of Self-service
- Transport – Driverless trains are about to commence in Sydney
- EFTPOS Cards – ApplePay & Samsung Pay allow use of our mobile phones or smart watches
- Passport Control/Airport Check-in – Facial recognition paperless process
AI and automation is becoming quite prevalent in accounting software. Let’s explore some ways in which this can be embraced to enhance our experience with our books!
Bank Feeds:
All major software packages include an ability to directly link with your financial institution and download your transactions daily. By using bank feeds, most of the data entry time is eliminated – the date, narration and amount of transactions prefill and it is just left for us to allocate against the Chart of Accounts. By using this feature, the risk of making typographical errors is pretty much eliminated and your bank will always reconcile.
Bank Rules:
Expanding on from the use of Bank Feeds – your software can review bank statement lines against conditions that you have set up and automatically complete the data entry. Every monthly bank fee and interest payment can code itself.
Filing Cabinets / Document Storage:
With an ability to now upload copies of invoices and store them within accounting software – your accountant/bookkeeper now has access to documentation as they require. By using electronic means, the need for physical storage is now reduced. MYOB & Xero both provide subscribers with a direct email address to allow invoices to be directly emailed into the electronic storage facility within the file.
Some software now can read these electronic invoices, and automatically prefill information such as Supplier ABN, Date, Amount and GST into the Bill template for you.
Artificial Intelligence:
Taking data entry a little further, Xero has an ability to recognise the Supplier and suggest coding based on how transactions with that Supplier have previously been allocated.
These are some of the ways in which AI and automation is showing up in bookkeeping processes. Implementing some or all of these features has proven to result in massive reductions in time spent bookkeeping and also data entry errors.
If increasing the amount of automation within your accounting processes is something that interests you, contact one of the Halpin Partners team to establish an action plan.
