Ask HN: Is it possible to automate accounting?

We want to try https://www.getmyinvoices.com/en/portals which promises to auto-download invoices and finds invoices in emails. (We haven't found the time to test it yet). Our bottleneck is not paying invoices, that's usually setup via credit card or direct debit, but filing incoming invoices for our accountant.

I use Quickbooks and it is reasonably hands off. Classifying transactions improves with time, the manual part gets reduced too.

Bookkeeping is not overly difficult, but accounting is much more than that. It has similarities to lawyers, in they you need to be staying current with the laws and regulations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420797 can be useful.

The real hard part about accounting is the questions you ask. the obvious ones can be automated (how long until we go bankrupt at current spend...). However a lot of questions require judgement calls.

Yes, to some extent. A business will have software that totals its revenue and expenses. There are judgement calls, though. If you have $1 million in receivables outstanding, how much of that will you collect? If you invested $10 million to build a factory, how quickly does it depreciate?