Leveraging AI: 6 Innovative Strategies for Accounting Firms

If you’re not using AI in your firm already, it’s time to analyze some of the time-consuming tasks that you or your team are performing all the time to see which ones can be assisted or fully offloaded to AI.

These six strategies are a great place to start.

1. Streamline Financial Reporting, Reconciliations and Forecasting

Financial reporting, forecasting and reconciliations are time-intensive. Minor human errors can quickly make a forecast inaccurate, and discrepancies can be missed in reconciliations. You can begin using AI to:

• Rapidly work through complex datasets
• Create structured reports from data
• Identify errors and trends

KPMG’s recent report found that 72% of companies use AI in financial reporting.

How?

Firms are using AI in quite a few ways for reporting:

• Scanning large datasets
• Adding citations and references
• Detecting patterns in data

Reconciliations are also being streamlined, with AI handling some – not all – of the end-of-month reconciliations. It’s faster and more accurate to run the data through AI, which can match transactions, identify discrepancies or errors, and even generate reports in minutes.

Businesses want to use big data to their advantage and will pay accounting firms for data-driven forecasts and projections. AI is assisting accounting professionals, allowing them to offer greater insights into the financial health of their clients’ businesses with forecasts and projections..

2. Automate Accounts Receivables

Accounts receivables keep money flowing into your firm or a client’s business. If invoices aren’t sent out quickly or data isn’t verified, it negatively impacts cash flow. AI is being deployed across accounts receivables to help:

• Gather data from invoices
• Verify the accounting of the invoices
• Route the invoice for payment or approval

Some advanced tools are mixing accounts receivables with forecasting, helping companies project cash flow based on paid invoices. Automation is also sending invoices and reminders to clients, allowing staff to spend more time on critical tasks.

Workflow enhancement is getting a facelift thanks to the addition of AI, helping many professionals get more done faster. Let’s see how.

3. Enhance Your Workflow and Communication

Inefficient processes can bog down your schedule and force you to focus on tasks that don’t add value to clients.

With the help of AI, you can streamline and automate mundane tasks to free up valuable time you can spend on core tasks.

For example, you can use AI in your workflow to automate:

• Notifications
• Approvals
• Document management

When it comes to communication, you can also leverage the power of AI to draft, edit and even reply to emails to keep your inbox under control.

4. Grow Your Firm’s Revenue

For firms, one of the most tangible benefits of AI is increased revenue. With the right tools and strategy, you can grow your client base and revenue while saving time.

There are endless possibilities to leverage AI to grow your firm’s revenue, including:

• Researching blog content. Get endless ideas for content that you can post on your website or on other platforms as a thought leader.
• Editing social media posts. Save time by editing social media posts in seconds or transforming other content into social posts that will engage your audience.
• Transforming long-form webinars into short-form clips that you can post on LinkedIn and other social platforms. One single webinar can create dozens of clips, helping you fill your social media calendar for quite a while.
• Repurposing the most impactful moments of your video or podcast content into short-form video clips. Creating teaser clips is a great way to get your audience and prospects interested in your services.

In many ways, AI can serve as your right-hand assistant in marketing, making it easier and faster to engage with clients and attract new prospects.

5. Streamline Tax Preparation

One area where AI can really shine is in tax preparation. From analyzing financial data to identifying tax deductions, artificial intelligence can streamline your processes in many ways.

It can also minimize tax liability, help to ensure compliance by detecting errors and omissions, and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the entire tax preparation process.

For example, your firm can leverage AI to:

• Collect tax information from clients with greater precision. For example, AI tools can help you understand the client’s prior year data from tax filing software, allowing you to send them more personalized questionnaires.
• Organize tax information. AI can recognize the information in the documents clients send with their questionnaires and transform it into organized documents.
• Help prepare tax returns. AI can recognize the values in forms, like W2s, K-1s, 1099s and 1098s.

With a tool like StandfordTax, you can use AI in all of the above ways to streamline tax preparation at your firm without complicating your workflow.

6. Improve Fraud Detection

When you have large volumes of financial data, it can be challenging to analyze and detect fraud using conventional methods.

Here’s where AI can step in to analyze large amounts of data in minutes and detect irregular patterns or anomalies that indicate fraud or financial irregularities. Because AI automates the process, it can be used more frequently, and action can be taken early on before fraud or irregularities progress.

With the right system, accountants can monitor financial transactions while improving the accuracy of their auditing processes.

Final Thoughts

AI opens a world of possibilities for accounting firms, from streamlining tax preparation to enhancing fraud detection and even improving cash flow through automating accounts receivables. These are just six of the many strategies you can employ to save time, improve efficiency and enhance accuracy. Embracing AI advancements now can help your firm enjoy sustainable growth well into the future.

Integrating AI into the workplace over time – not all at once – will help accounting teams transition to using these tools in their everyday workflow.

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Katie Thomas, CPA is a 40 under 40 CPA Practice Advisor recipient, Top 50 Women in Accounting recipient, and the owner of Leaders Online, where they help accounting and B2A (business to accounting) professionals increase their impact, influence, and income through thought leadership and digital marketing. To get in touch with Katie, schedule a time at: https://leaders-online.com/.