Finance and accounting
Reading documents, finding deviations, commenting on reports: where AI helps in accounting and why it should never do arithmetic.
What works well
| Task | Value |
|---|---|
| Reading invoices and receipts | very high |
| Reconciling against order and goods receipt | very high |
| Proposing account assignment | high |
| Matching incoming payments | high |
| Finding deviations at year end | high |
| Commenting on the monthly report | medium |
| Calculating amounts | unsuitable |
Introduction
- 01
One document type, one supplier group
Start where documents arrive regularly and in a similar layout.
- 02
Demand source locations
Every extracted value with page and position. Without it, checking costs more than the saving.
- 03
Consistency rules before model quality
Net plus tax equals gross, line items equal subtotal, IBAN with check digits. Those rules cost nothing and catch most of it.
- 04
Threshold for automatic posting
Documented, reasoned, and not quietly changed in operation.
- Track the deviation rate rather than the recognition rate.
- Evaluate per supplier; an overall figure hides one bad form layout.
- Keep original documents unchanged, independently of extraction.
Traceability for an audit
| Item | Why |
|---|---|
| Model and rule version per document | Evidences what read it |
| Source location per field | Allows tracing back to the original |
| Confidence per field | Shows where posting was automatic |
| Reviewer on deviation | Evidences human control |
| Threshold with release date | Shows which rule decided |
Those five satisfy the core of proper bookkeeping principles: traceable, verifiable, unalterable. See Logging.
Legal points
- Documents contain personal data of contacts; set retention separately from commercial-law archiving.
- Cloud processing of accounting data is processing on behalf with a possible third-country element.
- Automatic payment release without human review can be an automated individual decision.
- The retention duty covers the original document, not the extracted fields alone.
Choosing a task in finance
FREE ACCOUNT
Selection sheet and templates: finance
A sheet that picks the first task out of the ones finance actually has, with two tested templates and the review steps for them.
Worksheet3 items