When running a business, you are often left taking on lots of different roles. One of the most common areas that even the most successful business owners struggle with are the financial aspects, and particularly bookkeeping. Bookkeeping data entry can be dull and monotonous. Thankfully, there is light at the end of the tunnel with the use of apps, cloud software and bank feeds all powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
The three fundamental aspects of using AI to automate your bookkeeping process are:
- Bank feeds
- Data extraction
- Accurate and up to date data
Bank feeds
With the use of AI, we can download your bank feed data directly and securely from your bank. This lets us see the date, the description, amount and balance. Most software such as Xero will look at the data and match it to invoices already in Xero helping to eradicate human error. Another streamlining feature is the use of bank rules, these allow reoccurring transactions such as bank charges, salary and pension payments to be automatically analysed to the correct account with a click of a button.
It takes up to 45 minutes to correctly analyse out one page of a bank statement. By using bank rules for reoccurring transactions and allowing your accounting package to automatically match the payment to the invoice, it takes roughly 10 minutes to analyse out the same number of transactions. If you had 75 pages of bank statements per year this would save you 37.5 hours per year. Which is the equivalent of a full-time worker working one week solid just on adding bank transactions.
Data extraction
The advancements of AutoEntry, ReceiptBank and now QuickBooks Receipts has taken the chore of manually uploading invoices and receipts to your accounting software. With a simple picture of your invoice or receipt these
apps can extract all the data we require including date, supplier, amount and tax treatment. The software can also learn, so when similar types of invoices come in each month (e.g. a BT phone bill) it will learn what category or nominal code it has previously been analysed to.
This software can then push through the invoice into your accounting software. This allows users to do their bookkeeping on the go as and when they get the receipts, also saving a PDF of the invoice or receipt attached to the transaction in the software meaning you don’t have to hold on to the physical paperwork, saving office space and
time.
Accurate and up to date data
This is arguably the biggest advantage of streamlining the bookkeeping process. Using the above functions and apps gives accountants the opportunity for reporting to go further than just the statutory accounts 9 months after the year end, which at that point is no longer relevant for management and performance decisions. Using streamlined bookkeeping accountants can give meaningful management accounts that show accurate and up to data within days of the month ending. The functions of software’s such as Xero and QuickBooks, allows accountants to customise and report on almost any function within the business.
Caroline Mobley
Poolbridge Accountancy
The team at Poolbridge Accountancy are committed to supporting you and helping you to be successful. Our number one priority is to provide great service and quality advice that your organisation will recognise and benefit from.