AI is becoming capable of doing more and more of the things businesses have traditionally relied on accountants and other advisers to do.
It can analyse financial information, produce reports, identify trends, compare performance, explain figures and answer questions about your business.
So should you be using it?
Absolutely.
Many accountants are afraid that AI is going to replace them. We think businesses should embrace technology that can save them time and money and help them understand their business better.
But there is one rather important rule:
Put crap in. Get crap out.
Sorry, but there really isn’t a more accurate way of putting it.
AI can only analyse the information it’s given. And one thing we’ve learned from many years of working with business accounts is that bookkeeping data isn’t always quite as reliable as the business owner thinks it is.
We’ve seen bank transfers recorded as sales, personal spending mixed with business expenses, duplicated income, loan repayments incorrectly treated as costs and plenty of other weird and wonderful bookkeeping.
Sometimes, once we’ve corrected everything, the business’s actual results look very different.
Now imagine giving that incorrect information to AI.
It might analyse it beautifully.
It might produce a very professional report.
It might confidently explain how brilliantly your business is performing.
You might even make financial decisions based on it.
There’s just one problem.
The numbers it started with were wrong.
AI hasn’t necessarily done anything wrong. It’s answered the question using the information it was given.
That’s why getting access to information isn’t the same as understanding it, and why good financial records still matter.
So where does your accountant fit in?
We don’t think the future of accountancy is charging businesses to do work that technology can do faster and more efficiently. We’d much rather technology dealt with more of the repetitive work so that we can spend our time helping clients with the things that genuinely make a difference.
✅ Making sure the underlying financial information is reliable
✅ Understanding what’s happening
✅ Planning ahead
✅ Considering different options
✅ Challenging decisions
✅ Improving cash flow and profitability
✅ And helping you decide what to do next
And we’re embracing AI too
This is something we’re also building into the Business Wealth Academy. The aim of the BWA has always been to help business owners understand how their businesses currently operate and then teach them the easiest ways to make them so much better.
We don’t want business owners feeling completely dependent on somebody else to tell them how they’re doing and what to do next.
AI gives us another fantastic tool to help do that. We’ll be showing business owners how AI can help with different areas of running a business, while also teaching them the knowledge they need to understand their business and make their own decisions.
Our approach is simple:
✔️ Make sure the information is reliable
✔️ Understand what it’s telling you about your business
✔️ Use AI to assist, if you wish
✔️ Challenge the answer
✔️ Make your own decision
✔️ Take action
AI can give you an enormous amount of information. But knowing whether you can trust that information and what to do with it is where the real value lies.