And the beat goes on. The drum of AI in accounting continues to roll with one of the latest iterations showing up in tax prep work as Thomson Reuters has unveiled new AI-driven tax product capabilities.
At this month’s SYNERGY event, the company revealed how it is building generative AI-powered capabilities into its tax products, including in Checkpoint Edge, and ONESOURCE Global Trade Management. At the same time, Thomson Reuters said that its SurePrep product will launch auto-categorization capabilities within TaxCaddy, a client portal designed to simplify document and data gathering. This enhancement will allow taxpayers to upload multiple documents, which will all be auto categorized and prepped for review by tax professionals via AI and ML (machine learning) technology.
The company’s tax research product, CheckpointEdge will also use generative AI to help tax and accounting professionals orient themselves to tax topics and find answers more quickly. Checkpoint Edge AI Assistant is in beta in the USA from November 2023, with general availability in 2024.
Finally, Thomson Reuters will use generative AI in its ONESOURCE Global Trade Management system to determine the Harmonized System (HS) Code and calculate import duties and taxes.
As I have spoken about, any feature, function or task tax and accounting professionals do that can be better automated through AI will be. This should go without saying, but it’s not to be confused with taking anyone’s job away, per say. Remember, you are not the tasks you do, but the value and expertise you provide.
Back when cloud tech began allowing tax and accounting professionals to work in real-time with their clients, as well as automating tasks that took longer in desktop or manually, it didn’t take any accounting jobs. At this point the evidence is there that it made you more powerful accounting professionals.
Automation may continue to disrupt the idea of hourly billing, for some anyway, if you are still struggling with how to charge for tasks that can take increasingly less time to do. It may also challenge the kind of firm you are versus one you could be. Let’s be clear, these are good problems to have.
Allow automation like AI to work With you and not against you. Truly take a hard look at how you Want automation to afford you the time to be more meaningful to your clients, be it through tax planning, business advisory, and so on. It’s been said before but it bears repeating: the pace of change will never be slower than it is right now, so hop on, take some control, and enjoy the ride.