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Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target

55 points bmadduma | 1 comments | 11 Dec 25 22:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.48s | source

Working on automating small business finance (bookkeeping, reconciliation, basic reporting).

One thing I keep noticing: compared to programming, accounting often looks like the more automatable problem:

It’s rule-based Double entry, charts of accounts, tax rules, materiality thresholds. For most day-to-day transactions you’re not inventing new logic, you’re applying existing rules.

It’s verifiable The books either balance or they don’t. Ledgers either reconcile or they don’t. There’s almost always a “ground truth” to compare against (bank feeds, statements, prior periods).

It’s boring and repetitive Same vendors, same categories, same patterns every month. Humans hate this work. Software loves it.

With accounting, at least at the small-business level, most of the work feels like:

normalize data from banks / cards / invoices

apply deterministic or configurable rules

surface exceptions for human review

run consistency checks and reports

The truly hard parts (tax strategy, edge cases, messy history, talking to authorities) are a smaller fraction of the total hours but require humans. The grind is in the repetitive, rule-based stuff.

1. gopalv ◴[12 Dec 25 03:12 UTC] No.46240476[source]▶
This is roughly what my startup is doing, automating financials.

We didn't pick this because it was super technical, but because the financial team is the closest team to the CEO which is both overstaffed and overworked at the same time - you have 3-4 days of crunch time for which you retain 6 people to get it done fast.

This was the org which had extremely methodical smart people who constantly told us "We'll buy anything which means I'm not editing spreadsheets during my kids gymnastics class".

The trouble is that the UI that each customer wants has zero overlap with the other, if we actually added a drop-down for each special thing one person wanted, this would look like a cockpit & no new customer would be able to do anything with it.

The AI bit is really making the required interface complexity invisible (but also hard to discover).

In a world where OpenAI is Intel and Anthropic is AMD, we're working on a new Excel.

However, to build something you need to build a high quality message passing co-operating multi-tasking AI kernel & sort of optimize your L1 caches ("context") well.