I own a couple of small businesses, and I've tried a few things with my books - was on Bench for a year (thankfully not the year they shut down, and they were so incompetent I dropped them before that), tried to do them myself for a year, then upon realizing the P&L generated did not match the numbers I expected, hired bookkeepers on Upwork to fix them for me.

I really feel like I ought to be able to do them myself - it's just following some rules, and my accounts aren't that complex. Still, it was just enough of a pain that it was easier to hire someone overseas for cheap (especially since I know what the business' numbers should roughly come out to, so I can validate their work).

But as I've been using the latest AI models, I really feel like this is something that's going to be fully automated by AI in the next 1-2 years (at least for my very simple use case). It's simple enough that an AI agent should pretty trivially be able to fetch the docs from the various places that I sell upload them, categorize transactions (this is already basically automated by rules for me anyway) and then do whatever it is that bookkeepers do to close the books.

I can't help but think that bookkeeper is not going to be a profession in five years, and I'm just not sure where those people go. It's not like automating bookkeeping will expand the economic pie enough to create new jobs - I don't believe it's a bottleneck to anything at this point.