The future is here: How Intuit Assist is transforming accounting

AI in accounting and financial analysis has been all the rage over the past few years, but how can we use these tools in tangible, actionable ways? Can AI be more than a buzzword? Intuit Assist has rolled out several features that serve business owners in down-to-earth ways, and is setting the stage for the future of AI in accounting tech.

Even more AI features from Intuit Assist are coming soon, but here are just a few examples of the many ways that accountants and bookkeepers can use Intuit Assist in their firms and with their clients. How many of these resonate with you?

Invoice and bill creation

For construction, trades, or service-based industries with clients working in the field, Intuit Assist’s invoice and bill-create feature of taking a picture of a handwritten document has been super helpful. You can be on the road from dawn to dusk and never in front of a computer, but now you’re able to create an invoice or estimate right after meeting with a client by taking a picture of handwritten notes. You can also snap photos of receipts to enter into QuickBooks Online as an expense. In addition, email correspondence can be forwarded to create invoices, and vendor bills can be forwarded to be entered into QuickBooks Online.

This feature has saved our construction/trade clients time and headaches because they no longer worry about keeping track of these little slips of paper and manually entering them into QuickBooks at the end of the day.

Invoice reminders (with tone assistance)

If I need to complete a task and remember to write it down, I’m way more likely to do it. If a tool “remembers” for me and takes a stab at completing that task for me, I’m even better off!

Some organizations we serve at my firm, Good Measure Financial, have been using the invoice reminders/tone assistance features in Intuit Assist. This ultimately helps them collect outstanding AR faster, without needing to remember to review AR or send multiple follow ups.

Drafting a reminder email with a custom tone has helped, especially when you have writers block and just want to get the reminder out without crafting the perfectly worded message to a client. This is where true AI kicks in: Intuit Assist provides a snapshot of the client relationship that helps with reviewing the email draft. It includes client information, such as how long the accountant has worked with the clients and the history of payments (paid and late), as well as invoice information, including the total amount, remaining balance, the date the invoice was first sent, and the dates any reminders were sent.

As a result, you can select a tone that fits the occasion. Maybe you give more grace to your largest clients who are generally on time. Maybe you’re a bit firmer with traditionally difficult clients.

Using AI to support your writing and communication is some of the lowest-hanging fruit for AI usage. If you’re not doing this, you’re probably not writing as clearly or quickly as you could be.

Where the future of AI and accounting is going 

You need to have the ability to communicate and think critically, but when you leverage AI to take the first few steps and aid your critical thinking—why did x happen, then why did y happen, then what would be different if z had happened instead—you can find meaning within the data and position yourself as truly valuable to the market.

Today, we are at the beginning of what Intuit Assist and other AI tools can do … these will only be refined and made more helpful over time!

Just imagine, an insights feature within the Intuit suite with a queryable interface, where you can prompt it back and forth about your financial data and have a natural conversation. The beauty of large language models and AI research tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.ai isn’t just the response to your initial prompt; it’s the second, third, and fourth responses returned as you continue prompting, adding more nuance and clarifying what you want to know.

The beauty is in the drill-down, where nuance and context live. Maybe your clients want a quick list of their highest-volume customers. What’s the trendline on sales to those customers? Why have they grown, what services are you selling to them, and what does the nature of customer support look like for them?

In your own firm, do your clients even fit your ideal client profile, or are you providing low margin services to them? What needs to change to align reality with your forecasts?

This is where accounting tech is going in the future. This is AI truly elevating business owners and putting data at your fingertips.

Your firm and AI

Ultimately, I think the accounting and bookkeeping firms that elevate themselves and their services with AI will go farther and faster alongside their clients. The ability to provide real-time insights about real activity happening within a business and counseling business owners in accordance with their goals will set apart the best firms.

It’s not just about “winning” and being the best accountant you can be; you’re legitimately adding more value and good to the world when operating like this. Our firm, and probably your firm, serve organizations that change the world in their sometimes-little sphere of influence. The more we allow AI to assist our critical thinking, the more we all succeed.