Accountants share their major AI use cases

Accountants share how they're using AI

May 6, 2024 9:30 AM

While many accountants are determined to stay as far away from artificial intelligence as possible, others have found ways to use the technology to yield tangible benefits for their firms (see "Accounting's reluctant AI revolution").

Whether they're fully embracing AI or still keeping it at arm's length, accounting leaders are already using these tools to address the pipeline crisis, surface insights and enable new efficiencies — often in some very specific ways.

Below, six firms share the multiple ways they're implementing AI and related tools, and the benefits they've seen.

PKF O'Connor Davies

Data preparation: "We are trying to come up with ... use cases that can potentially go cross-functional, where doing one or two things can bring in almost 30-40% efficiency in their day, whether that be tax or audit or ESG," explained technology advisory practice leader Suma Chandar.

"So, how do you scrub data from a PDF or Excel or from a Word document and put it in a format and analyze it quickly?" she asked. "Everyone wants to do that for different reasons. They want to scrub it for financial statements or for an audit or for an analysis. If you want to call it a use case, scrubbing data from a PDF and putting it into an Excel and being able to give the end user the ability to analyze it without going through so many invoices is very simple and you're saving 30-40% of your time on this, so this is something that cuts across the firm. It's a pretty simple solution but that is one very powerful use case."

Armanino

Cashflow analysis: "We've got 13 Week Cash Flow that has RPA, some machine learning and some analytics," said Carmel Wynkoop, the partner-in-charge of AI, analytics & automation. "The RPA goes and gathers information around spend and cash, the machine learning analyzes this information and then predictive analytics can explain what your cash will look like in 13 weeks. We're seeing a lot of traction there on a client basis."

SOC 2 preparation: "Audit Ally is our SOC 2 platform we created in-house and within the tool itself we're leveraging Anthropic's Claude [family of large language models] to help auditors fill out the information they need," Wynkoop explained. "So think of an evidence request: You have to write these things who knows how many times. There's no need to key all that information in over and over…. You don't have to open up Copilot or GPT, you're working directly in it. … It saves a paragraph or two of writing, it saves a few minutes, but over the course of a year that makes a big difference. … You can't just automate the entire CPA's soup to nuts — that would be a terrifying liability — but for the little things that you get along the path are so much easier now than they used to be."

Bespoke digital "workers": "This was 15 hours a week reconciling funds across 70 entities with hundreds of bank transfers. We created a digital worker that interacts with these web-based systems and does all the consolidation and reconciliation and provides a full audit trail and then sends it for approval," Wynkoop said. "We also created a digital worker that goes into 100-plus investment statements, pulls information on a monthly and quarterly basis — they're spending 50 hours a month doing this and creating journals — so the digital worker now goes and does all this and creates a journal entry, points out the anomalies and routes it for approval. They save about 500 hours a year utilizing the RPA."

Answering internal staff queries: "Everyone wants to know, 'What days am I off?', 'How much can I get in my 401(k)?' … Using Copilot Studio we've experimented with things like that, or directory information: If someone needs an AI expert, they'd quickly find Carmel," explained OJ Laos, director of Armanino's AI Lab.

GWCPA

Artificial intelligence and future concept

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Financial statement analysis: "We take a client's financial statement, export it to a PDF, take all the client information out … and we upload it and ask, 'If you were going to analyze this, what would be the key factors you'd alert the client to quickly?' Within seconds, it does it," said GWCPA managing partner Samantha Bowling. "[This is] something we would do anyway but it would take us a while to analyze it. … We're using it for clients who do bookkeeping work and outsourced CFO type work. We see this bring a quicker tool to get answers."

Generating content with consistent tone: "We went through this whole rebanding thing," Bowling explained. "We've been able to generate stuff that would have taken us forever to do, so it's been a huge time-saver. Let's say we communicate with clients, I put in 'This is what I want to say, how do you change the wording to illustrate these values?' and it does it. It's unbelievable how fast it works."

Exploring hypotheticals: "We asked, if you had a client who had a bunch of leases on equipment, and if we gave you those leases and gave you comparables for the leases in the [Washington, D.C.] metro area, could you tell us if it was below or above market?' And it said, 'Yes, I can do that,' and even put it in table format," Bowling said. "It's kind of crazy … We're having these Foresight Fridays — foresight is one of our values — in the summer where you have four hours to expose yourself to something new. I'd ask questions like, 'How would you capture this information and what would be the benchmark and put the results in a table for me?' and it did it in less than five seconds."

Finding what you forgot: "I had a client ask me what other executive bonus programs can [someone] offer, like life insurance?" Bowling said. "And so I could say to ChatGPT, 'I know these benefit packages are good for executive officers, what else am I missing, can you analyze this for me and tell me how I could deliver that to my clients?' and it answers. It's like we finally have the technology that can really provide value and we can really charge for value now as opposed to time.

CLA

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Answering internal staff queries: "We provide an interface where we can have documents and questions and images and all sorts of things go into an interface they can interact with and [it] gives them back answers. The questions could be about process, it could be about advising or consulting," explained James Watson, managing principal of service at CLA.

Information extraction: "We had a large nonprofit client who had over 800 reports they had to go through annually," explained Spencer Lourens, the firm's managing principal of data science, machine learning and AI. "So, 50% of someone's full time equivalent was going through these sometimes very lengthy reports and extracting the same information across all of them. What we did was say, 'We can create a process by taking the information and having the pipeline run where those questions are asked to the AI models involved, and they will go through and provide answers and try to cite themselves in the process to, hopefully, shave off hundreds of hundreds of hours per year."

RSM US

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Tax position papers: "Our clients get very complex very fast," said Sergio de la Fe, digital enterprise leader at RSM US. "You need to take into consideration legal precedents, the tax law itself, maybe [other] position memos we've taken and bring all that together with their facts and findings and write a position paper on this specific position. We've been able to create and leverage language models with generative AI to help us write those memos because it accesses all of our databases and information and is able to help us generate a response. So not just research, it's leveraging the actual end product in how those position documents are written."

Automating compliance: "What we have been able to do is leverage generative AI to take the client's regulatory environment, on the one hand, and their internal controls and process document, on the other hand, and bring them together to map where our clients are meeting or not or only partially meeting regulatory requirements," de la Fe explained. "Think of how hard that was in the past."

A resource of resources: "I can ask it: 'Tell me what automation tool I can use to do a sample selection.' You chat with it, and it gives you the tool you can use for sample selection for your audit client," he said. "Another example is, 'What is our independence policy for the stocks I can buy?' and it doesn't do your independence compliance for you, but points you in the right direction because sometimes it can be hard to find things with a firm of our size. A lot of our HR tasks, for example, are also included in this service … We created these chatbots for internal use, but we're also using them for our clients."

MBS Accounting

Enhancing client communications: "We use it in client communications to improve tone," said marketing manager Adolfo Marquez. "We've used it in lead follow-ups to check out tone and to keep a consistent professional voice and help those whose grammar might not be their strongest point. Also, to make standardized email templates."

Search engine optimization: "We also use it a lot with SEO to rephrase and automate landing page creation, adding some specific POV as a firm," he added. "So one example is we are in the middle of a website redesign. I have used AI to come up with landing pages — we have industry pages and location pages. We use [AI] to automate content creation and then I went in and added things to make it really stand out."