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.
There’s a lot of subjectivity in how GAAP is applied and interpreted - creating accruals, deciding when revenue should be recorded, blah blah.
LLMs can help to handle the subjectivity in how GAAP is applied and provide justifications, which previous rules-based tax software could not before.