How Intuit, Xero, Sage And SAP Are Positioning AI To Change Your Accounting Department

(This column originally appeared in Forbes)

It's July 2024. You're running a small or mid-sized business. Or maybe you're a senior financial manager. You want to leverage AI to make your accounting and finance operations better and your people more productive. What options do you have today? Here's what you'll find.

A Bunch Of AI Startups

There are many startups that are leveraging AI to do all sorts of things in accounting.

For example, Ember, Layer and Teal are developing applications that will embed within existing platforms in order to eliminate synchronization of data with accounting software. Rows, GPTExcel and Numerous.ai are offering smart, AI-based spreadsheets (or formulas for spreadsheets) that, these companies promise, will "build better spreadsheets faster." Basis, Materia and Tutti are rolling out large language models to perform tax and financial research for both financial managers and outside accountants.

H&R block has "assistance" features that leverage AI to help file tax returns. Startups like Lili's AI accounting platform - which is targeted at very small businesses - promises to manage “your accounting and payments in one platform simplifies your bookkeeping and gives you a clear picture of your financial position." A number of AI based bookkeeping startups - like Kick, Pilot and Puzzle are also in the space. And there are vertical applications like FundGuard, which has raised millions for an AI based application geared specifically for asset managers.

For the most part, the above applications - while showing promise - are in their relative infancy and are still in development. If you want to get in on the ground floor, go for it. But buyer beware this year.

If you’re a financial manager, or an accountant (like me), then you're probably conservative and - unless there's a significant business demand - don't like to be on the bleeding edge of technologies. My clients are using well-established accounting software applications and - rightly so - are looking to these vendors to introduce AI features in order to increase productivity and help their businesses run more efficiently. So when it comes to AI features, what can you expect to see from some of these bigger and more mainstream accounting software companies this year?

Xero JAX

Xero - which boasts more than 4 million subscribers in over 180 countries has introduced Just Ask Xero - or JAX. It's an AI Assistant that will do things like generate and edit a quote by voice command, alert when there's an overdue invoice (and help create the appropriate response), proactively prepare a payroll run in advance for review and approval and help with cash projections.

Intuit Assist For QuickBooks

Intuit launched their Intuit Assist for many of its products late last year. For its flagship small business accounting platform QuickBooks, Intuit Assist offers a natural language reporting and analytics tool ("what is my income year to date?", "who are my largest customers?") along with its AI advice on trends, issues and observations it gleans from a company’s financial data. Similar to Xero, it will also identify overdue and potentially overdue invoices and help craft responses based on the relationship with the customer.

Sage Copilot

Not released yet (although you can add your company to the waitlist), Sage's popular accounting software Intacct will soon have its own AI assistant called Copilot, that also promises to perform similar functions as JAX and Intuit Assist like preparing payroll for review and providing data and analysis of a company's financial operations on voice command.

SAP Joule

Joule is SAP's AI assistant that will perform many of the functions I've described above but is also offering a more advanced workflow oriented experience for users. For example, it has a pretty cool process for resolving customer disputes and returning items that involves both a conversational interface and intuitive assumptions as to what's needed next in the process. This is more advanced functionality than what’s being offered by Intuit, Xero and Sage but lays the groundwork for the future.

And that's the key word: future.

For the most part the AI functions being offered by these companies today are nothing more than a glorified version of ChatGPT. But they’re being built using your company's data as its large language model. If you start digging into these functions get ready to see words like: testing, preview, waitlist, beta, trial and experimental. This is the software company telling you not to trust the results its AI functions are delivering. Yeah, they’re just as nervous about this stuff as we are.

I've played around with these products and with Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini and the results are irregular and unreliable. Sometimes the queries just spin. Other times the results are inaccurate. And even if the AI features work as promised, the incomplete and lousy data in my accounting system – which is my fault - produces the unsatisfactory results that you would expect.

The good news is that you can see where the train is heading. Some of the startups I mentioned above will fail, but others will flourish and their AI tools will transform the way accountants and financial managers do their work. The AI offerings from Xero, Intuit, Sage, SAP and other smart tech companies will continue to evolve, get better and become more reliable. Right now the media, PR and marketing is driving their AI offerings. Within a few years it'll be their customers and competition that will be telling them what AI functions they need. Like all nascent tech, this will quickly improve as it’s used more.

We haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. Based on these early days, the future for AI in finance and accounting is exciting.