What are your thoughts on implementing Finance and Accounting automation solutions for businesses, and are there any known limitations?
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.
The main problem with automating finance is the risk of costly mistakes. If an automation glitches and adds extra zeros to an invoice or payroll, you can instantly create a huge loss—think turning a $1,000 payroll into $10,000, which dwarfs the modest time savings. The marginal benefits of automation in finance are small, while the potential downsides are massive, especially when the automation interacts with bank accounts. For example, automating payroll for ten staff might save only 40 minutes a month, which translates to about $15 in savings—hardly worth the risk of a $99,000 error. Instead of fully automating, I recommend doing the heavy‑lifting manually, then using a simple queue to batch payments (e.g., calculate amounts, then push transactions through Wise once or twice a month). You can also leverage AI for tasks like parsing financial statements, generating cheap analysis packages, or automating bookkeeping, but keep the core financial actions under human control because the juice is often not worth the squeeze.
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.
The regulations aren't too tight to do it, but they're definitely tighter than other situations, and honestly I just don't like dealing with it. In practice, if you want to do these automations in US healthcare you can't just use Make because it's not HIPAA compliant — you need a final compliance filter/check, and the same applies to financial regulations; it makes your life way harder, forces you onto alternative platforms, and requires things like anonymizing customer data. As a business owner you get to choose your niches, and in my case the juice usually isn't worth the squeeze, so I stay away from highly regulated industries and stick to less-regulated, typically smaller businesses (though I've worked with 8-9 figure companies too). It's a tradeoff: regulated/enterprise healthcare clients mean bigger ticket sizes, longer contracts, and slower-moving business, but also a whole new tech stack to learn, unfamiliar applications, data anonymization work, and real legal/regulatory risk. I can get the same benefits working with other kinds of businesses without those cons, so that's what I choose to do — though I could see situations where someone's genuinely set on going after that market anyway.
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.