Will accounting be replaced by AI?

In recent years, the application of AI and automation technology has penetrated different industries at a high speed, which inevitably makes growing numbers of people worry about if they will be replaced by AI. Among them, there are a lot of accounting professionals who face a large amount of data every day and have relatively clear work rules.

ChatGPT, a current global sensation, was asked about this as well. When asked, “Which jobs do you think ChatGPT will replace,” it replied indirectly, “I do not have the ability to predict the future, but it is likely that some tasks currently performed by people may become automated or streamlined by technology like me.” ChatGPT also defended itself by saying, “It is important to note that while some tasks may be automated, technology like me can also help to augment and support human workers, enabling them to be more productive and efficient in their roles.”

While there is no precise answer to whether accounting professionals will be replaced by AI, it is obvious that intelligence has a continuous effect on the cost reduction and efficiency improvement of financial work and drives it.

RPA Evolution in Finance

RPA is a significant application for intelligent enterprise management. As the global digital transformation is underway and the demand for RPA increases dramatically across industries, traditional RPA is no longer able to meet financial users’ more demanding need for automation. The integration of RPA and AIGC (AI Generated Content, refers to the use of AI technology to generate content) successfully extends the capability boundary of RPA and enhances its dynamics, which will optimize the financial process more widely, helping accounting professionals improve their efficiency and quality of business processing.

In reporting and consolidation, based on the practice of integrating, it allowed a lot of awesome robots to work in Finance Department to resolve many “difficult” situations.

Related-party Transaction and Reconciliation Bot

Area of Expertise: Related transaction business is complicated, subsidiary relationships between related enterprises are complex, a lot of in-transit in the payment approval process, different accounting principles between related parties, a large number of reconciliation staff and frequent staff changes, etc.

Job Skill: In addition to uniting reconciliation rules, accounting methods of related transaction and reconciliation period, Yonyou Related-party Transaction and Reconciliation Bot allows for the automatic retrieval of related transaction data, generating reconciliation reports for the current period, and identifying inconsistencies in data to notify, remind and warn relevant users of the checking results. It also generates reconciliation assessment reports after the reconciliation period. The robot significantly reduces the workload of manual checking in related transaction business and greatly improves the quality of related transaction data.

Direction of “Self” Evolution: AIGC will make up for RPA’s lack of “creativity”, working on more intelligent solutions to anomalies and rule optimization in related transaction business. The evolutionary process is: ①Extracting a wider range of related transaction data, ②Automatic and flexible generation of reconciliation reports, ③Identifying reconciliation discrepancies, ④Automatic reconciliation adjustment based on experience, ⑤Notification / Alert / Reminder if automatic reconciliation is not possible, ⑥Cycle through Steps ① – ⑤ until discrepancies are acceptable. Generating a reconciliation assessment report after closing the accounts, ⑦Recommendations for rule optimization of related transaction.

Intelligent Audit Bot

Area of Expertise: Large amount of statement audits, high labor costs, audit rules are complicated, etc.

Job Skill: Yonyou Intelligent Audit Bot allows for the automatic account and statement audit and statement-to-statement audit, performing audits throughout the statement submission process, which can provide early warning of data risks and significantly improve the efficiency of statement submission and data quality.

| ① When there is a change in accounting data or closing status, Intelligent Audit Bot will automatically notify by email. It checks the accuracy of accounting data from financial disclosure and analyzes its influence on financial statement data to notify users to generate a statement or not.

| ② Statement-to-statement audit, which means Intelligent Audit Bot can automatically audit financial statement data. Such as, primary and supporting statements audit, pre-audit, cross-entity audit, generating audit reports and notifying relevant users.

| ③ Account and statement audit, which means Intelligent Audit Bot automatically generates account and statement audit reports at the time of statement submission. It identifies discrepancies between current accounting data and financial statement data and notifies relevant users when audit results are out of the acceptable range.

Direction of “Self” Evolution: In-depth analysis of what is behind financial statement data and intelligent identification and early warning of potential problems based on the integration of AIGC and RPA. It sets up an intelligent audit system that integrates pre-warning and prevention, audit monitoring and post-audit-reporting, which ensures the high quality of enterprise development.

| ① Human-computer interaction generates adjusting entries automatically. It identifies non-compliance data and problematic adjusting entries, continuing to improve the template library of entries. Also, it analyzes the reasons for statement adjustments to reduce the risk of human operation.

| ② After an audit report was generated, the robot can automatically analyze and list error descriptions, change reasons, etc. according to experience, significantly reducing the workload of financial staff.

The evolution of RPA technology is currently at the “super automation” stage. Besides, AIGC has been continuously widespread and is widely recognized and gets much attention, which boosts the technological advance of RPA and expands its audience scope and enhances market impact.