As an account manager at Pilot, I run the month-end for a list of clients that goes from small businesses to pretty large tech companies, answer their questions, and send them their monthly financials. The part of the job I love most is the people, and the part that used to eat my days was everything between the bank feed and the finished package.
This year, using Meridian, I closed over 100 books in a month. Before Meridian, I never would have been able to do that. The month-end work is all still there, but Meridian takes the manual stuff, the reconciling and the categorizing and the sorting through statements, and gives me finished financials to review.
Where the hours actually went
The biggest change is that I can hand Meridian a pile of information I used to have to sort through myself, give it directions, and go work on something else while it does the work.
One of my customers had an account we'd only just gotten access to, with about five months of bank statements nobody had touched. We didn't even know about the account for a few months. I gave Meridian the five statements, asked it to reconcile the account, and went back to another client. It finished in about 20 minutes. I wasn't sitting there for those 20 minutes either, I was working on other things. I came back, reviewed what it had done, and the account was done.
The second example is classes. Another customer wanted class tracking across a full year of transactions they'd already recorded. Adding classes is really an extension of categorization, and if you give Meridian enough detail about how the client wants things broken out, it can go in and apply them for you. The whole year took about an hour. Doing it by hand would have taken me at least eight.
That's how I was able to get to 100 clients. I give Meridian the task and the context it needs, it does the first pass, and I check the work before anything goes to the client. Multiplied across a full client list, that's how I got to a number I couldn't have reached before.
Using AI as a partner, not worrying about it
I think it's reasonable to feel anxious about AI if you work in accounting. Things are changing fast, and every time you look at the news it seems like AI is getting smarter and fixing itself. I've felt that anxiety too. What changed my mind was working with it closely every day and seeing how much a human still has to be involved.
All of our clients are humans. Talking to the people at these companies, knowing how they like to be asked for information, building enough trust that you can work through a mistake together or try something new, that's a big piece of the job and none of it goes away. I don't want to lose that, and neither do our clients.
And a lot of accounting isn't as black and white as it looks from the outside. There are plenty of situations where someone has to weigh GAAP, tax compliance, and the client's actual circumstances and decide what's best here, and there might be more than one right answer. That decision is still mine. I'm far from a world where AI runs accounting with no humans involved, and I don't see one coming. What I see is a change in how I use my day: Meridian does the manual work, I review it, and I get to spend more of my time on the judgment calls and the relationships that made me want to do this job.
If you're wondering what this looks like inside your own firm, schedule a call and we'll walk you through a close.
