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56 points bmadduma | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.805s | source | bottom

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. missedthecue ◴[] No.46293790[source]
"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."

These are all true statements, but all of those things are solvable with classic software. Quickbooks has done this for decades now. The parts of accounting that aren't solvable with classic computing are generally also not solvable by adding LLMs into the mix.

replies(3): >>46294069 #>>46296551 #>>46302613 #
2. alex7o ◴[] No.46294069[source]
They might not be solvable but you can get 5-10% Improvement on them, unfortunately you can't do a new product that is exactly like QuickBooks but 5% better at reconciliation etc.
replies(1): >>46295879 #
3. danudey ◴[] No.46295879[source]
LLMs by their inherent nature cannot be relied on to be true and correct, which by coincidence are the only traits that matter in accounting.

If you want better software, then sure, maybe a coding assistant can help you write it faster, but when it comes to actually doing accounting I would not rely on an LLM in any way shape or form any more than I would do so for law.

replies(1): >>46298223 #
4. Kiboneu ◴[] No.46296551[source]
This conviction doesn't seem to acknowledge the problem at scale. Decades of great UI development will still leave out edge cases that users will need to use the tool for. This happens fundamentally because the people who need to use the tools are not the people who make them, they rarely even talk to each other (instead they are "studied" via analytics).

When /humans/ bring up the idea of integrating LLMs into UIs, I think most of the time the sentiment comes from legitimate frustration about how the UI is currently designed. To be clear, this is a very different thing than a company shimming copilot into the UI, because the way these companies use LLMs is by delegating tasks away from users rather than improving their existing interfaces to complete these tasks themselves. There are /decades/ of HCI research on adaptive interfaces that address this, in the advent of expert systems and long before LLMs -- it's more relevant than ever, yet in most implemenations it's all going out the window!

My experience with accounting ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bookkeeping / LLMs in general resonates with this. In gnu cash I wanted to bulk re-organize some transactions, but I couldn't find a way to do it quickly through the UI. All the books are kept in a SQL db, I didn't want to study the schema. I decided to experiment by getting the LLM to emit a python script that would make the appropriate manipulations to the DB. This seemed to take the best from all worlds -- the script was relatively straightforward to verify, and even though I used a closed source model, it had no access to the DB that contained the transactions.

Sure, other tools may have solved this problem directly. But again, the point isn't to expect someone to make a great tool for you, but to have a tool help you make it better for you. Given the verifiability, maybe this /is/ in fact one of the best places for this.

5. irvingprime ◴[] No.46298223{3}[source]
Bingo! You found the prize! Putting tech that is prone to hallucination in charge of anything that has serious consequences when it's wrong is a terrible idea. You do not want hallucinated payments or receipts, or legal citations. You want these things to be both true and correct, EVERY TIME.
replies(1): >>46304402 #
6. stuffn ◴[] No.46302613[source]
I go the other way and say this is a vast oversimplication of the job by a tech bro doing what tech bros typically do.

I am not an accountant but for many years I worked adjacent to them as a developer. I got a lot of time to ask questions and I was generally curious. Even at the SMB level accountants don't necessarily always have a "ground truth". There are so many ways to bury financial data that it needs almost constant vigilance. Yes, in theory, there is one ground truth (inputs should balance with whats there) but in practice humans are SHOCKINGLY good at committing accounting fraud. GAAP is another thing.

7. TheNewsIsHere ◴[] No.46304402{4}[source]
“We had to re-state our financials and amend our taxes because the AI screwed up and we didn’t have anyone who understood accounting look at our books.”