In recent years, financial professionals and accounting practices have increasingly benefitted from the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning (ML) and AI have empowered finance teams to significantly increase the level of automation in their daily tasks while uncovering deeper insights from financial data.
By Mohammed Mosam, director of product marketing and growth for Sage Africa & Middle East
AI can learn how to spot patterns and even predict them. For example, instead of spending hours manually sorting and tagging every entry, accountants can use AI to make classifications faster. Additionally, AI excels at identifying anomalies within large datasets, such as general ledgers, enhancing accuracy with ease.
Powerful functionality such as this is increasingly being woven into the tools accountants use every day. Sage, for example, offers Sage Intacct customers an advanced Accounts Payable Bill Automation to reduce the burden of manual data entry when processing vendor bills. AI reads data from invoices and extracts it to populate a draft bill record.
Our AI correctly identifies vendors; understands different formats for names, dates, addresses, multi-line items, and tax amounts; locates the correct fields; and feeds these into a draft bill ready for approval and payment. It also spots and flags any duplicates. As the system learns over time, it gets ever more accurate, allowing for continuous improvement. After a month of learning, accuracy will be around the 96 percent mark, saving users about 50 percent of the usual time spent capturing invoices and reducing the manual effort required.
LLMs and generative AI: The next accounting automation revolution
Advances in the AI revolution are expected to radically transform the nature of accounting, finance, and people management processes. While it may take years for this transformation to be fully realised, many advances are already changing the way we work today in significant ways. One example of an exciting development is the rise of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), as exemplified by the rapid adoption of tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
What makes these tools so ground-breaking is that they can create fresh content from text, images, video, and computer code. Beyond obvious applications such as customer chatbots and supporting the creation of marketing materials and, companies are finding exciting ways to weave the technology into business software.
Generative AI and LLMs enable software vendors to build ‘co-pilots’—or virtual assistants—that help professionals navigate their financial software and data more efficiently. The real power of the technology comes from the way that it can help finance professionals to rapidly interrogate and package information without needing to scrutinise the data manually.
Given the risk of sharing proprietary data with public tools like ChatGPT, companies will want to use specialist AI built into their business software. These solutions—such as Sage Copilot*—employ robust encryption and compliance with the latest data protection regulations to ensure information remains secure and private.
Real-time business improvement
Generative AI could be used to rapidly create draft reports, summarise complex content, and highlight risks, provided it has access to information such as income statements, balance sheets, and expense breakdowns. In so doing, it could become a trusted member of their team, handling repetitive tasks in real-time, and recommending ways to drive business improvements.
An AI-powered assistant streamlines tasks, identifies errors, and generates actionable insights unique to each business and accounting practice. The software can help with forecasting, cashflow management, and generating and sending invoices with simple, natural language commands.
Some other key features of generative AI financial software might include:
- Intelligent understanding: Using natural language to interpret commands conversationally, customising responses to each user’s specific situation for a more tailored experience.
- Task management and automation: Simplifying organising tasks with personalised lists, prioritising them based on urgency, and automating repetitive tasks.
- Communication and collaboration: Helping prepare and send messages with the right tone and timing, sending personalised customer invoices or employee reminders in seconds rather than hours.
- Data analysis, reporting, and insights: Gaining insights and custom reports to support decision-making, including quick cash flow analysis and recommendations for financial improvements.
- Personalised recommendations: By learning from user interactions and preferences, the software could offer advice to help improve budgeting and financial planning and deliver better financial outcomes.
Generative AI can assist finance professionals address some of their most frequent pain points like cash flow and payment delays helping SMBs accelerate customer payments, optimise working capital, and make smarter financial decisions.
Making sense of complex data instantly
Business data can provide finance professionals with useful insights, like what their most profitable products are, how their cash flow is looking, and how much stock they’ll need on hand at various times of the year. But making sense of this data is a time-consuming task for even the most spreadsheet-savvy of accountants.
Luckily, AI can analyse huge amounts of complex business data in an instant. With generative AI, it becomes possible to create accessible, actionable reports or summaries immediately. The power to automate complex tasks and get personalised business advice will be a game changer for financial professionals in the years to come.