Artificial intelligence continues to transform the way people work in every industry, and the finance sector is no exception. AI technologies have automated almost all manual accounting tasks including audits, payroll, tax and banking.
Despite there being many attempts throughout the industry, for over 20 years, accountants still struggled to find the tools they needed to utilise the volume of data now at their fingertips. The options available to them were simply too complex or cost prohibitive.
Seeing this gap in the market, Propel Ventures set out to give an unfair advantage to those accountants who were ready to explore the role of AI and automation in helping them reshape their roles and offer advisory services to their clients.
The aim of this tool, later named myadvisor.ai, would be to allow accountants to generate a report filled with tailored information and insights in less than ten minutes.
Challenge
Accountants and AI joining forces
Accountants play an important role in supporting businesses with financial analysis and providing them strategic insights. However, the manual analysis of a company’s accounting data takes a great deal of time, and accountants had been forced to choose which of their customers were going to receive a high quality advisory experience or a low quality one.
The baseline level of advisory service from accountants is a vulnerable point in the retention strategies of most practices. Accountants need to be able to prepare for an in-depth advisory discussion without hours of pre-work to study the trends in the numbers — if they are going to raise their standard of services across their entire customer base.
With an innovative and creative vision of an AI advisory assistant in mind, Propel Ventures set out with a plan of intensive user testing, development and research that aimed to see this new advisory solution released to market in six months.
Solution
AI-powered advisory reports
Propel Ventures identified the power of placing the accountant who plays the roles of data custodian and advisor into the AI loop, to great effect.
The AI solution designed by Propel Ventures scrutinises accounting data, identifies insights and crafts those insights into sophisticated natural language reports – accountants are then able to overlay their own commentary onto those reports and focus their time on having insightful conversations with their customers.
The combination of natural language generation, with generally accepted accounting principles and AI algorithms are complementary and capable of producing valuable business insights and forecasts.
AWS services used to deliver this application
EC2, DynamoDB, S3, Route53, Cloudfront, Cloudwatch, ECR
AWS Instances were provisioned in EUR, USA and AU to serve different markets and manage privacy and GDPR concerns.
Outcomes
myadvisor.ai
Propel developed a market leading advisory reporting solution which utilises artificial intelligence (natural language generation) to convert the numbers in accounting software into words. myadvisor.ai automatically generates management reports in minutes, which would otherwise take hours.
myadvisor.ai was awarded an AFR innovation award and subsequently expanded from the Australian market to the US, Canada, Finland and Sweden (in Finnish and Swedish).
“I have to say, it feels like cheating! Stuff that I have poured over and analysed over my career in accounting now at the click of a button! Incredible! I am very impressed.”
Serena Shoup, Certified Public Accountant and Founder of The Ambitious Bookkeeper.
“myadvisor.ai has been such an effective tool for our firm. It not only saves us time when creating reports but provides our clients with an insight to their financials that is easy to read and truly does help them make better financial decisions. The reports are top notch and a must if you want to provide the best service to your clients. You’ll definitely stand out with these reports.”
