[jryio]

I run a s business (small if you compare it to tech companies).

I can tell you the drag is between your own tools and the real world (which is very messy and inconsistent): taxes, compliance, payroll, amendments, share structures, etc.

Within my island, my books are in order, invoices and time keeping is fully automated, calendars and sales pipelines are connected.

I'm sure there are many businesses whose inner islands are not as orderly. The zillion tools out there all try to bring equanimity to the chaos and yet here we still are with fresh books, quickbooks, and xero...

[cik]

A deacde ago Xero, Shoeboxed, Calendly, Payment Evolution, and a time tracker eliminated all my overhead.

I scaled to 30+ people with automated administration. My cost was under $150 a month for everything we needed to run a successful consultancy and product business. Our accountant was blown away by how simple his life was.

I'm constantly amazed at how it has gotten much worse in the resulting decade.

[jorisw]

How did it get worse?

[hirako2000]

Wrappers around LLMs promise to bridge that gap. I'm sure it can do well for the vast majority of cases. But I do wonder what the outliers would cost.

E.g traditional automation + humans handling the drag = $4,000 per month with a couple of known blunder each year

vs traditional automation + AI = $400, with unknown number of blunders.

Of course it depends how much a blunder costs, to solve, or swallow. But I would bet that accounting errors even for a small business would cost the business on the long run. And that's assuming we don't yet have adversarial behavior which we can expect to come from both the inside and the outside.