Crunching numbers has always been hard, but in today’s world where the amount of data just keeps increasing, the job has gotten even tougher. Artificial Intelligence may have sounded as a thing of the future a few years back, but it’s in use everywhere around us in today’s world. AI has evolved the way a lot of people work, take AI technology like Siri and Alexa redefining personal automation for instance.
AI can streamline the accounting role and help increase efficiencies when it comes to processing numbers and huge stores of data. Here are three ways accountants can benefit from implementing AI in their daily lives.
- Streamline data entry and analysis : Finding your data in the middle of spreadsheets, PDFs and financial reports can be a headache. Using deep learning AI can organise your data for you, presenting the numbers and reports in a visually appealing and easy to understand manner. This means quicker and smarter insights. It also saves the human effort of number crunching and collating. How does AI do this? It automatically extracts data from an image of the bill, classifies it based on the kind of spend it is and automatically fills it in a report. Deep learning also means that the system keeps learning with time, and it collects all the data being collected, to form. A comprehensive report, these come in handy for the business to evaluate how well its doing.
2. Reduce fraud and human error : With spending becoming decentralised keeping a track of corporate spending can become problematic for big companies. With countless payment methods and websites, auditing every expense made by a company thoroughly is a cumbersome experience. This is why so many companies face internal frauds. Human error also accounts for increased expenses, for instance accidentally accounting for a bill twice. These errors and anomalies can be detected and reduced with the help of artificial intelligence. AI can help auditors catch fraudulent expenses by predicting spend patterns and accounting for double entries.
3. Enforce company policies : When it comes to money every company has its own rules and policies in place, enforcing these however is a whole other subject. Making sure your employees are being compliant to your policies can be made easier with the use of AI. Quickly detect any non compliant spend by analysing the type of payment made, the date the bill is submitted, and the nature of the spend by scanning bills, invoices, purchase orders, etc. Once detected if it's compliant or not, companies can take a befitting action to resolve the issue.
This also helps companies see how well their policies are working and whether or not they should revise them.
The finance industry works on precision and having the assistance of technology will only help it become smarter and more efficient with time. As AI continues to grow so does the scope of improvement and opportunities it opens for accountants and the world of accountancy.
