[evrimoztamur]

As somebody who worked as an accountant, I saw several times where automated reconciliation solutions devastated books with repeat mistakes and lacking audit logs. I saw interns do the same, too.

An automated solution to reconcile statements based on LLM matches removes transparency on how your books are prepared and might create a false sense of trust in the preparation of your books. In case of an audit, people will be in great trouble when their answer is ‘yeah, the AI booked everything.’

I think there is an opportunity here, but I don’t see it ending well until we can put the accountability of your accounts in check.

[sbolt]

Sean here, author and EM of the recon team at Modern Treasury. I completely agree, we us AI to surface suggestions to users during manual review so there's full transparency and human confirmation at every step. Our automatic recon doesn't use LLMs for the reasons you outlined.

[benreesman]

I’ve made a couple of critical comments and I hope I wasn’t too rude.

The way you present the case in this comment is vastly better than in the post.

There are ambiguous cases in certain accounting treatments, and hinting a resolution is, well it still makes me nervous but it’s not crazy.

[sbolt]

All good, and thank you for the feedback!

[aidenn0]

If the AI is right 99% of the time, what are the odds a human detects the remaining 1% rather than just being complacent?

[spookie]

From a human-computer interaction standpoint you do raise a fair point.

Even if in reality the AI misses _considerably more_ than that, there's a good argument to be made that such hints may steer the human from their initial, correct assumptions, or even reasoning.

[daft_pink]

I agree with you. I feel that when faced with books with large amounts of transactions that have similar dollar amounts, you simply need to take another step in terms of reconciliation to make sure you are matching the correct transaction to assure the other side of the transaction versus matching the bank balance. You can't just use machine learning to try and match these transactions, but need a specific process to match them.

I think this is a niche issue related to accounts receivable potential errors as most companies I work with don't have the problem of constant repeating amount transactions.

[_3u10]

Haven't even gotten to processing fees and taxes.