[zugi]

> using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping

A friend gave AI access to his accounts to summarize his finances.

On reviewing the AI-generated report, he spotted a $500 monthly loan payment that he didn't recognize. He asked AI where it came from, and AI admitted that it was a mistake.

Perhaps in its training data, most people have a $500 loan payment, so AI just stuck one in there.

[oarla]

Probably it estimated future AI subscription costs.

[Yizahi]

I always wonder, just how many payments per month do these people have that they need to "summarize" them instead of scrolling through history in about 1 or 2 minutes max? It would probably take me longer to type in a concise LLM query and fiddle with access,APIs, permissions and stuff, than to view all my expenses for a year.

And on the same note, regardless of how many transactions there are, how come people are unaware about some of them? How does that happen? Do you have loan payments you take and then pay monthly but then get a 29 day amnesia every month on schedule? Were they banned by their bank from the banking app or something? I have ADHD (real, shittier one, not an Instagram version) which makes me forget both long term and short term things all the time, for decades. It doesn't prevent me remembering which big transfers I need to do, or done already, and what is the balance now or typically end of month. Just what kind of financial empire with offshore tax evasion accounts necessitates some 3rt party "audit" of one's individual finances?

[komali2]

I pointed Claude at a read only API account for our ERP, where our accounting happens, and it was pretty useful for helping figure out some historical missing data we left off when we were importing pre-ERP stuff. It did start losing the plot pretty quickly though and get confused about which actor was which (e.g. some of our customers are also our suppliers).

[opsnooperfax]

Or maybe the AI made up the part about making it up. There’s no way to tell. Don’t use a model to validate itself.

[tdesilva]

is this the ChatGPT finance features they launched in May? it keeps asking me to integrate my finance data, but I have doubts about how useful it would actually be (not to mention some distrust about how well they would actually protect my data).

[mcmcmc]

It would be extremely useful data for things like dynamic pricing as ad targeting, just not on the user side