Can AI Do My Bookkeeping? | Hacker News Reader

Can AI Do My Bookkeeping?

theautomatedoperator.substack.com

2 pointsidopmstuff7 comments

You should check out plain text accounting software Beancount. I've built a skill for this here https://github.com/ouachitalabs/skills/blob/main/beancount/S... and I use it for my custom personal finance agent.

Ah, very cool - I'll take a gander in the morning.

> My response: I suspect the guy who I found on Upwork who charges $10/hour has probably made mistakes in his work.

I suspect that the Upwork guy, however, would realize it if he were making a tremendous error, and not just keep going.

Maybe, though you might be surprised - first Upwork guy I hired did insanely bad work that was obviously horribly wrong, and I ended up getting it all refunded.

But in any case, tremendous errors won't actually cause me big problems, because I'd catch them on my review of the P&L. Small errors I might miss (whether committed by human or LLM), but they're not going to be material anyway.

I guess it's analogous to a roomba. If it misses a spot, I can always finish up with my own vacuum.

But even a roomba will occasionally decide to drag a swath of cat shit through my house, whereas a hired cleaner would know better.

Keep in mind that there's a difference between bookkeeping and accounting.

Bookkeeping is simply the systematic recording of financial transactions.

Accounting is the interpretation, analysis, and reporting on said data.

Sure, and I do my own accounting in Google Sheets. Each brand that I own is pretty simple, so this isn't that hard (and it's important to me that I do it myself to maintain context on my businesses).

That's why an LLM is good for bookkeeping for me - I'm not actually using the books in any strategic capacity, and I know the numbers in the business well enough that I'll catch any obvious mistakes. The books are purely to give to my CPA to do my taxes at the end of the year.

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