We’ve all seen the signs that our company or department is hitting an efficiency wall: consistent workflows start to break down, new programs are introduced with redundant functions, and your teams find themselves having follow-up meetings just to clarify information that’s already been covered. While these obstacles are a natural part of growth, they eat up time, resources, and the attention of your senior employees and specialists.
To break through these walls, many companies are now turning to AI. If everything you read on social media were true, then AI would not only eliminate all inefficiencies, but the need for any employees at all. The reality is, AI hype may promise the world, but what it can actually deliver is far less extravagant. That being said, the use-cases of AI are still impressive for specific, targeted tasks, particularly for time-consuming and resource-intensive departments like accounting.
Do You Have to Increase Headcount to Increase Accounting Efficiency?
Before these tools were viable, the only proven method for getting through an efficiency wall was increasing headcount. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case. The value of AI in business isn’t that it replaces people, it’s that it makes the people you already have count for more. In accounting, the goal is to automate those menial tasks that bog down your most valuable team members. That way, they can focus on the high-level, strategic work they were hired to do.
Want to see how your current accounting workflows could benefit from AI?
5 Effective AI Use-Cases to Increase Efficiency in Accounting
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Automate Vendor & AP Processes with AI-powered OCR
Vendor payments and accounts payable (AP) processes are a natural sticking point for efficiency, as they tend to be tedious, slow, and error-prone. Until recently, proper invoicing meant stopping everything to manually type or write all the information out before filing it into your system.
AI can digitize AP procedures with the use of tools like Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Rather than perform manual data entry from scratch, OCR can handle the heavy lifting by:
- Automatically reading invoices
- Extracting relevant information like vendor names, amounts, and due dates
- Populating a draft bill for human review
Once a draft bill is generated, all your team needs to do is verify its accuracy. By automating data entry, your teams can focus on higher-level tasks like qualitative analysis, while also closing your cash flow cycle more quickly and efficiently. This isn’t some expensive, optional add-on either, but rather a core feature of the high-end payment processing tools used by most reputable single-source providers.
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Rapidly Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
Standardized procedures are the foundation of accounting process improvement, as they facilitate quality control and make it easier to train new team members. However, creating the documentation for these processes has always been a major efficiency bottleneck.
In the past, building SOPs required a team member to painstakingly track and capture an entire workflow with notes, screenshots, and recordings. Afterwards, they would do their best to distill it into a replicable procedure. This can be challenging, particularly in multi-stage workflows where small but vital details are easily missed.
AI tools aid in SOP development by listening to you, transcribing your actions, and assembling a complete procedural document for each of your processes. With the effort of manual creation gone, there is no excuse for a company to lack well-defined SOPs.
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Turn Lengthy Meeting Transcripts into Actionable Intelligence
Although recording meetings has been common practice for some time, the process is prone to human error, leaving teams with either no recording at all or endless hours of raw transcripts that are difficult to use. This is why most companies encourage employees to take notes during meetings, but that makes it almost impossible to be truly productive or present in the conversation. Whether it be follow-ups, clarifications, or note-processing, the administrative work it takes to distill meetings into important information is a constant source of inefficiency.
AI tools alleviate the burden of this “work around the work” by handling the entire information capture process, including:
- Automatically recording and transcribing the conversation
- Summarizing the key points to save reading time
- Extracting intelligence by identifying primary topics and action items
Instead of an intimidating scrawl of hastily taken notes, these tools provide a perfect, searchable record of every conversation. Automating this single process can save roughly 4 hours a week per team member; out of a 40-hour work week, that’s a 10% increase in efficiency that can be reinvested into more critical areas.
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Use AI as a Thought Partner
While AI isn’t able to replicate years of human experience, it can be an incredibly effective thought partner. By bouncing ideas off of an AI tool, you can pressure-test proposals, identify blind spots, or discover best practices you may not have considered.
This capability benefits team members at all experience levels, offering distinct advantages for both junior staff and senior leadership:
- For Junior Accountants: AI can act as an on-demand knowledge base for newer team members, enabling them to find answers to common questions without having to constantly rely on their mentors.
- For Senior Accountants and Leadership: AI tools can enhance senior team members’ existing skill sets, allowing them to apply their own knowledge more effectively and explore nuanced solutions that could help your team push past an efficiency wall.
While asking for advice from senior colleagues is still essential, AI can bridge the gap when those experts are busy attending to other tasks. Although it’s not perfect, and certainly no replacement for a seasoned professional, quality AI tools are competent enough to answer simple questions or brainstorm potential solutions.
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Accelerate Analysis to Gain a Decision Advantage
Perhaps the most valuable strategic benefit of AI is gaining what our experts call a “decision advantage.” This is the ability to get to the point where you can not only make the right decision, but do so faster and with more confidence.
Before AI, teams would be trapped for days trying to interpret raw data before even considering making a choice. While the process of compiling data sets for official reports still requires careful human oversight, AI accelerates the next step: the analysis itself.
For example, once an official report is generated, an AI can perform a variance analysis in seconds, expediting what is typically a slow, manual undertaking so the entire team can operate with greater agility. This newfound speed works for a variety of tasks and creates a ripple effect, reducing the number of follow-up questions, errors, and wasted time that key team members could use on strategy instead of data forensics.
Curious how Apex implements AI tools like these?
The Downsides to Using AI Tools in Accounting
While AI offers many ways to improve efficiency, any responsible leader must consider the potential downsides before a full rollout. Common problems that companies encounter typically fall into two main categories:
- Slow Adoption and Disruption to Current Systems
Introducing new technology is always disruptive, and even the best tools will fail if your team doesn’t embrace them. Key challenges include:
- Uneven Adoption: Team members adopt technology at different speeds, or what our experts refer to as the “bell curve of adoption”. A few will jump in immediately, but most will wait, with some resisting until they have no other choice.
- Learning Curves and Pushback: Using novel AI-driven systems requires new skills and a different way of thinking, which can create friction and initial pushback from staff who are comfortable with existing workflows.
This is a normal part of any major technological shift. It’s very similar to how tools like Google Search were slowly adopted before becoming the standard. As long as you establish a thoughtful plan for training and manage the transition, adoption should occur naturally over time.
- AI “Hallucinations” and Accuracy
In finance, data integrity is everything. This is where the most significant risk of generative AI lies. AI models can “hallucinate,” meaning they invent facts, sources, or numbers but present them with complete authority. Because of this risk, you must always have a skilled human expert in the loop. The AI can perform the initial task, but the final check must be conducted by a professional to verify accuracy.
How a Single-Source Provider Can Be the Key to Optimizing Accounting Workflows and Procedures
Implementing AI technology on your own requires significant internal resources. Not only that, but the process to vet, deploy, integrate, and maintain these systems pulls focus from your team’s primary responsibilities. A better alternative is to leverage a fully integrated single-source provider; that way, you can get the benefits of cutting-edge AI tools without your organization taking on the risk and overhead of building these systems internally.
The operational efficiencies of partnering with an AI-integrated service provider directly translate to your business in three key ways:
- Greater Speed and Accuracy: A partner whose operations are accelerated by AI can deliver services like financial reporting faster and with fewer errors.
- Cost-Effectiveness: You gain the benefits of a multi-million dollar technology infrastructure without the massive capital investment, turning a fixed cost into a predictable, operational expense.
- Future-Proofing: Partnering with a single-source provider keeps your operations current without your internal team having to constantly research and reinvest in new technology.
This approach allows your core team to remain lean and focused on the high-level strategy that drives growth, leaving the routine and time-consuming administrative tasks to dedicated specialists.
Takeaway
While increasing headcount or seeking the help of an accounting process improvement consulting firm may help companies push past accounting efficiency walls, it can also strain budgets and add to existing administrative burdens. Instead of hiring more staff or consultants, another effective approach is to use proven AI applications that amplify the capabilities of your existing team.
Five AI use-cases to improve accounting efficiency include:
- Automating Accounts Payable: AI can be used to read invoices and populate draft bills, eliminating tedious manual data entry.
- Generating Standard Operating Procedures: AI tools can observe and document workflows as they are performed, making it easy to create and share SOPs.
- Extracting Actionable Intelligence from Meetings: AI can automatically transcribe and summarize conversations, allowing team members to focus on (and better contribute to) the discussion.
- Using AI as a “Thought Partner”: AI can serve as an on-demand sounding board, helping team members at all levels brainstorm ideas and identify blind spots.
- Accelerating Financial Analysis: AI can perform duties like variance analysis on completed reports, allowing the team to gain a “decision advantage” and focus on strategy.
While the right AI tools can be effective, it’s also important to acknowledge the limitations of AI, such as slow team adoption and the need for human oversight. For many companies, the best approach is not to deal with the hassle of AI integration internally, but rather to partner with a single-source provider who has already integrated these tools into a proven, efficient operational model.
