AuditGuard AI: Secure, Verifiable AI Workspace for Accountants

Unfortunately AI tends to create new verification work while removing granularity and awareness For example in my work I often have to determine fiscal year salaries of employees from initial, closing, calendar year end payroll register and reconciled with T4s. For various reasons the registers can come in weird formats like yesterday, screenshots in a word documents depending on my client Can an LLM like convert this to an Excel grid? Yes. Reliably? Absolutely not. A couple of the employees were paid OT in spite of being salaries employees and unless I caught that before I gave the LLM my column names it would be missed. The new verification work added time cancels out much of the time savings of not manually entering every figure, while simultaneously giving me less granularity of what's going on.

Unfortunately AI tends to create new verification work while removing granularity and awareness For example in my work I often have to determine fiscal year salaries of employees from initial, closing, calendar year end payroll register and reconciled with T4s. For various reasons the registers can come in weird formats like yesterday, screenshots in a word documents depending on my client Can an LLM like convert this to an Excel grid? Yes. Reliably? Absolutely not. A couple of the employees were paid OT in spite of being salaries employees and unless I caught that before I gave the LLM my column names it would be missed. The new verification work added time cancels out much of the time savings of not manually entering every figure, while simultaneously giving me less granularity of what's going on.

I find that Claude does a good job of pulling information from PDFs. We use it for logging contracts and POs in our trackers, save a bunch of time from manually doing it. I’ve had managers ask me to start more complex projects by “throwing everything into Claude”, but to be honest unless the outputs are really straightforward spreadsheets, the stuff Claude builds is super messy, to the point where I wish I could just do it myself. Unfortunately I work for a firm that tracks billable hours so we’re kinda pressured not to do things manually… Basically Claude I like using Claude for 4 things: 1. Pulling info from PDFs, because then rather than an exercise of pulling and typing yourself, you’re just reviewing. 2. The first pass of rolling stuff forward 3. A last ditch effort of finding why something isn’t reconciling. I wouldn’t take it for its word, but if you make sure to prompt it to walk through its reasoning, it’s pretty easy to check if it’s right. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but it can help point you in the right direction. 4. Formatting large data exports. I don’t think I’d want it to do anything crazy, but it’s pretty easy to have it remove useless rows. Again, I’d rather be in a situation where I have to do a quick completeness check to make sure everything I need is there rather than manually formatting. I think as long as you’re using your brain and not letting your own skills fall off, AI can really help with a lot of the grunt work of accounting. I even think it can be a decent teaching tool as long as you look at its sources to verify what it’s saying is true. The issue is when some people just throw everything they have into Claude and don’t use their brains. In that way they’re robbing themselves of a deeper understanding and development. People also don’t review the outputs which is also a problem. TLDR: give it the grunt work you’d give to interns. If I had interns/starting staff at my firm I’d give it to them, but since we only hire senior and up, Claude fills the role pretty well. Then just do your job as a senior and review what it gives you like you would a staff and try to use your own brain to solve problems first, and no issue.