The day AI walked into my accounting job

Three years ago, I started in a small office with piles of paper everywhere. Receipts, invoices and bank statements stacked higher than my glass of water.

I spent hours typing numbers into spreadsheets, line by line, trying not to make mistakes. PDF bank statements meant relief. Paper ones meant a long day.

After hours of typing, the numbers blurred and my brain felt like it switched off.

But then, something changed. AI quietly walked into my job.

With AI, I have built my own automation systems. I only need to drag and drop the bank statements, even scanned ones, and within minutes a clean, accurate file appears.

It does the same for invoices: extracting the data, renaming the files, and organising them in a way my past self would have called magic.

The work that used to take hours now takes minutes. While it runs, I breathe, stretch, make tea or move on to something meaningful.

The endless piles of paper have slowly disappeared, and the silence of typing has turned into the quiet satisfaction of seeing things get done faster than I ever could.

And here is what that experience showed me:

Everything in modern accounting is downstream from automation and intelligent tools.

You can be diligent, detail oriented, technically strong. But if you spend your time doing tasks a system can do for you, you stay stuck in the past.

Once you build or adopt automation, your capacity multiplies. Your value shifts from inputting numbers to solving problems and advising clients. That is the accountant I am growing into.