Artificial intelligence in Accounting

In the latter part of 2013, I noticed several new developments in cloud accounting software. I suppose one of the key advantages of cloud accounting software is that it allows the software provider to concentrate on what they do well, while at the same time allow other software providers to integrate with their products. And, some of these products include some level of artificial intelligence.

To give an example of a non-cloud product first, Irish firm OCRex use optical character recognition to help accounting practices do bank reconciliations when smaller clients don’t do this – see http://www.ocrex.com/home. This software reads scanned bank statements and reconciles opening and closing closing balances, and leaving the accountant with the job of checking for missing items only. Thus, this product is intelligent in that it matches items on the bank statement using amounts and other information like to a reference.

Now let’s take this idea to the cloud. Several accounting software products can now scan emails., faxes and scanned documents to determine not only the amount of a business transaction, but also determine what kind of transaction it is. For example, xero software offers an add-on which reads transactions and posts automatically to the correct expense account. From my understanding of the xero add-on, it also learns as it goes, learning what supplier is posted to which expenses account etc. This certainly has a lot of potential for small businesses, reducing processing time and storing documents in the cloud.