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Comment by riddlemethat | Hacker News Reader

I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings.

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Then I have good news, you can save even more money by cancelling your Claude plan and using GnuCash for free, without having to worry about the inevitability of having your financials hallucinated.

I use GnuCash for my small business. I am not a programmer, but know enough to be dangerous. My use for AI was to have it write a small python script that will take my bank csv and set accounts properly based on how I have categorized them in GnuCash in the past, it spits out a clean csv to import into GnuCash. Now I can see exactly what the matches are, and the whole thing runs on my local computer. No worries about hallucination of new account names.

The python script is basic enough that even I can figure out what it is doing, and I still have to review the import to GnuCash and reconcile with my bank.

It is saving me about an hour of work every week right now.

I think this is my biggest use of AI - making small tools to do the work locally rather than sending things to the cloud to be stolen and messed with.

There's something to be said about first impressions and the GnuCash website's first impression does not give confidence in its ability to handle finances.

Ironically for this thread, I think an AI redesigned website would do wonders here.

A conventionally well-designed site is actually much less trustworthy for me.

GNU cash website immediately tells that it is not a Saas and doesn't need to upsell the latest trendy addons, for it to survive.

It tells that it is not "investing" in marketing to eventually turn a profit.

It is not looking for acquisition opportunities or next funding rounds.

If you want to see what a trustworthy website looks like, take a look at SQLite or postgresql or even this website itself.

Csv files are fine with a bot categorizing the expenses.

No need to have a desktop app to do entry.

Why would I worry about an LLM properly cataloging expenses (book keepers job) when we keep human in the loop with the CPA to check their work?

I think you don’t understand the problem the AI solved/reduced costs on.

What is Claude using to keep the books, if not Quickbooks?

If they’re just using excel or their LLM vibe coded its own double entry accounting system this is a pretty bad idea.

3k is like 1/50th of the penalty you're going to get if you make a mistake on your taxes, trust me I know, and Anthropic isn't going to be covering those penalties.

IRS is going to make a ton of money off you naive people. Get a better CPA who's not committing malpractice like your current one.

Not sure why this is getting down voted. You will get audited 3 years after the offense and they will charge you interest higher than the worst credit card for those three yrs (during which you had no clue you offended). Be fool and replace your CPA with your favorite text autocomplete machine learning model and let me know how that works out for you.

The downvotes are because my post was clear and they did not understand the point. We did not replace our CPA. We replaced the book keeper. The human CPA is the human in the middle reviewing the work of the AI. There is no responsible business owner alive today who would trust an LLM to replace their CPA, IMHO.

This is blatantly false. The interest and penalties from the IRS are much lower than the average credit card (25%+, compounding daily).

And your statement that “making a mistake on your taxes” results in penalties above $150k is so dumb I don’t even know where to start.

You know CPAs make mistakes all the time, right?

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