I was at the QB Connect event in Calgary this week.  Not surprising, the hot topic was AI.  As a finance professional coming from a tech background I went to all the AI presentations.

One of the things I noticed as a bookkeeper is that much of the AI depends on having clean data already in the accounting software.  Since a lot of work I do is in Catchup and Cleanup bookkeeping, I was very interested to find out how people were using AI to get the information INTO the bookkeeping software.

Anyone who works in the rescue bookkeeping space knows how bad the information can be.  Receipts are faded, sometimes written on, sometimes coffee stained, often times missing.  You know, real life receipts from real customers.

My mission was to find out from tech enabled service providers using AI, how they handled the imperfect data that we get from our clients.

I heard stories about trying to use various tools like Claude to interpret receipts once scanned in.  Machine produced perfect receipts are not a problem.  Easy and fairly reasonable priced tools like HubDoc and Dext have existed for years that can handle this. Some of the accounting software providers are starting to include this feature right in the product.

Where the solutions still need a ‘real’ bookkeeper is for those receipts that aren’t perfect.  Very complex AI systems still struggle with receipts that are crinkled, coffee stained, written or even contain a ‘received’ stamp.

This is some areas where I see the tools struggle:

• A restaurant receipt with two different type of taxes (thank you British Columbia) and a tip.
• Border receipts from imported goods GST is randomly applied and sometimes the whole transaction.
• Receipts with a mix of taxable/non taxable line items
• Receipts with handwritten notes.
• Missing receipts

While these don’t represent ALL receipts, they aren’t unusual.

And what was the solution I heard for the imperfect data?  Yep, you guessed a real human person verifying and coding the information.

A few more ‘tech-enabled’ firms are using tools like Claude to help – I am not sure yet about the security in using AI but I am not an expert in this space.  

So while it isn’t 100% there yet, there are some ‘secure’ tools that can help do the heavy lifting.  For the complex or unusual – you still need a competant bookkeeer.