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I am bad at bookkeeping and have put it off every closing. This year our bank needed a trial balance, so for the first time I handed the books over.
I am bad at bookkeeping. Not because I dislike numbers, but because of the stack of receipts and the judgement about which account each belongs to. Every closing, I have put it off.
This year there was no putting it off: a trial balance was needed for our bank. So for the first time I handed the books to our own AI server, miraiGen.™Cube.
What eats the time in bookkeeping is typing each journal entry into the accounting software. One receipt, one line of a card statement — each becomes one entry. We enter them individually rather than grouping by account, and that is what a single financial year comes to. I had been typing those by hand.
That went to zero. The entries now come out as a CSV in the format the accounting software imports, so what used to take days of typing is now a single file imported into the accounting software in a few minutes.
The format requires a specific character encoding; produce the file in another one and the account names turn to gibberish and the import fails. The previous year's exported file was examined and matched — the details were covered too.
When I handed over one month of receipts — sixteen pages — back came a table filled in down to the account and the note. Four entries were blank, every one of them turning on what the money was spent on: information that exists only in my head. Had they been filled in by guesswork it would have been worse. A plausible-looking error is one nobody finds later.
When a figure does not reconcile, the cause is never written in one place, so you end up walking back and forth between everything that might be related. That was handed over as well: find the discrepancy, find the cause, repeat until it agrees.
We had no travel policy. With no rule in place, no per-diem could be paid for a business trip. That was drafted too, approved at the end of October and applied back to the start of the financial year. Writing policies is the archetypal postponed task: things keep running without them, so nobody chases you — and all the while, something that could have been paid is not.
It feels about five times faster. That is not a measured figure — but I am not going back to doing it by hand.
If you are weighing up whether to bring AI in, my suggestion is to start with the job you find most tedious and have put off longest. Hand over something you are already good at and the difference is marginal; hand over something you have been avoiding and the before and after are unmistakable. For me that was the books.