What automations can I sell to accountants or bookkeeping firms?
I’d start with simple bookkeeping automations: automated tax‑filing, data extraction from invoices and receipts, and a system that sends an email or text each time a client performs an accounting‑related action. At year‑end you can aggregate all those records, feed them into an AI model and get insights. You can also build CRM or project‑management integrations, resource‑planning tools for accountants and their clients, or basically any SaaS that streamlines routine accounting tasks.
Using AI for accounting is a bad idea—high downside risk, low upside. Just pay your accountant a few extra hundred dollars a month; bookkeeping is cheap. Instead, focus your effort on the top of funnel: get more eyeballs, more bookings, improve the reservation follow‑up, and collect more five‑star reviews. That’s where you’ll generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity cost, not a few hundred from bookkeeping. If you still want a bookkeeping system, log every card transaction via Plaid or API into a chart of accounts and export to a spreadsheet or QuickBooks.
You can automate many finance and accounting tasks—like categorizing transactions, variance analysis, and building dashboards—but if you’re creating a regulated financial product you must comply with relevant regulations (though I don’t recall the exact U.S. body). I avoid highly regulated industries like medical or finance because I don’t want to deal with that compliance burden; I stick to the B2B agency space where it’s more ‘wild west’. For most businesses, the limitation isn’t the automation itself but data‑security concerns; however, the onus of due diligence is on the company hiring you, not on you as the provider. You can still add value by using AI to spot large expenditures or strange transactions in QuickBooks or Xero exports, or to categorize bulk transactions, without trying to compete directly with those platforms.
When you jump on the call with a larger bookkeeping client, start by asking what prompted them to meet—this reveals their motivations and curiosity about AI automation. Then request a walk-through of their typical customer journey, from first brand encounter to the last conversation, and listen carefully. Compare what they say they want with how their customers actually interact with their business. Most sizable bookkeeping firms still have inefficient processes that scale by hiring more people, yielding low revenue per staff ($10k-$20k). By spotting these low-hanging fruit—arbitrage opportunities where AI can automate manual steps—you can show how moving to a model where revenue per staff reaches $100k (capping at four or five clients per person before needing another hire) creates massive value. In short, diagnose their goals, map their journey, uncover inefficiencies, and position your AI workflow as the lever that dramatically boosts their productivity and profitability.
He explains that IT companies are service businesses and follow the same funnel as any other service business: lead generation, sales (discovery/scoping call), conversion (proposal/agreement/invoice), onboarding (kickoff call), fulfillment (building IT systems), and retention (ongoing management/managed service). Because the funnel is universal, you can adapt systems from other niches—cold‑email, speed‑to‑lead (PPC), content (SEO), automated referral/follow‑up/reactivation, proposal generator, asset generator, CRM, sales admin, webhook‑triggered kickoff calls, AI‑generated project briefs, and a template library for one‑click implementation. The key is to take a bird’s‑eye view, draw inspiration from adjacent niches, and teach the client to fish rather than give them a fish.
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