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by FooBarWidget 958 days ago
Many Dutch companies pay salaries by

1. receiving payslips from the accountant, and then

2. manually initiating bank transfers to each employee for the amount in the corresponding payslip, and then

3. manually initiating a bank transfer to the tax authority to pay the withholded salary taxes.

This is completely useless manual labor. There should be no reason for this to be a manual procedure. And yet it's almost impossible to automate this. The accountant portal either has no API, or it has an API but lets you download the data as PDF, and/or the API costs good money. The bank either has no API, or it requires you to sign up for a developer account as if you're going to publish a public app, when you're just looking to automate some internal procedures.

So the easiest way to pay salaries and taxes is still to hire a person to do it manually. Hopefully one day that won't be necessary anymore. I wouldn't trust an AI to actually initiate the bank transfers, but maybe they can just prepare the transactions and then a person has to approve the submission.
4 comments
martinald 958 days ago
I don't think this really has much to do with AI. In the UK there are solutions like Pento now which do all this, including automating payments via open banking to the user and the tax authority and automatically filing tax filings:

https://www.pento.io/la/payroll-software

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nvm0n2 958 days ago
That's just a bank problem. Certainly this isn't how payroll works for large companies. Banks usually let you upload XML files that define a set of SWIFT payments, this is how I do payroll even for a small company. The accountants supply the XML file too, presumably they have an app that generates it.
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is_true 958 days ago
In my country it's similar but for some data you have to upload to the government agency's site, I think it was earlier this year that they released a statement saying that people using software to perform actions on the website could get banned.
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abrichr 957 days ago
Thanks for the tip!

Automating repetitive GUI workflows is the goal of https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt

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