Using AI to close the books quickly and cleanly.

What if you didn’t have to do mountains of work to close the books? What if there was no busy season?

That may sound like an unrealistic dream for controllers relying on 10pm espressos during the monthly, quarterly, and yearly scrambles. After all, you’re charged with closing the books on time across all company spend, from T&E to procurement. And a large portion of that spend happens outside of your control by employees with questionable expense reporting discipline.

The simple solution — adding headcount to your department — isn’t so simple in this market. And it doesn’t exactly make anyone more efficient. So, how can you streamline your process without asking your CFO for a brand new hire?

The answer is accounting automation. More specifically, robust and customizable automation powered by artificial intelligence that helps you ensure that all spend is in policy and on budget — with every expense documented correctly by employees. In other words, AI-enabled accounting tools can help automate compliance so you can turn the books in cleanly and quickly.

The typical closing process is full of manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks — and one too many spreadsheets. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

An AI-led spend management solution with native ERP integrations can automate workflows across employees, managers, and the finance team. The benefit of enterprise-wide automation is that you, the accounting team, are not burdened at the end of the line, dealing with insufficient, inaccurate, and delayed data and trying to put the puzzle pieces together. Or worse — trying to find the one spreadsheet cell where someone miskeyed a critical number.

With AI powering every step in the expense process from transaction to approval to documentation, you have all the information you need to close the books on time, every time.

So how does AI amplify the power of everyone in the business? AI-enabled spend management maximizes employee compliance, minimizes manual entry, and reduce expense report headaches by:

With AI, you can close your books in hours instead of weeks. More importantly, AI mitigates the risk of human error, giving you complete confidence all the way through reconciliation.

In a 2022 Sage Intacct poll of 1,400+ finance and accounting professionals, 93% of respondents said they’re under pressure to close the books faster. Meanwhile, more than 60% said that streamlining the closing process would free them to focus on big-picture strategy.

Now, leading controllers aren’t just shaving countless hours from their workload through automation — they’re helping their companies save serious money through AI-generated insights.

Every accountant and controller — no matter how seasoned or thorough — can make manual entry mistakes. (We’re only human, after all.) The machine learning capabilities of AI, however, can greatly improve your data accuracy. One small mistake in one cell of a spreadsheet could trigger a messy ripple effect of errors. But, with AI’s ability to instantly process large datasets, that small mistake is not likely to happen – and if there is an issue, it can be contained and corrected automatically.

Of course, the unprecedented efficiency of APIs and NLP (Natural Language Processing) also means that you can cut back on those late night espressos.

Artificial intelligence won’t do your job for you, but it can be the tireless assistant you always dreamed of. It can act as a powerful safety net to help flag potential fraud, duplicate charges, overpayments, and entry errors too. Beyond that, AI can improve your financial planning and analysis by tracking industry trends and analyzing spend, enabling senior leadership to make better decisions.