I've been on Pilot's accounting team for five years now. When I started, I felt like a data entry clerk who happened to have an accounting degree. Most days were spent on manual reconciliations, categorization, and chasing down missing transactions. The work had to get done, but it felt more like data wrangling rather than accounting.
Then we launched Meridian.
The problem we actually had
We're one of the largest accounting firms in the US. Over the last decade, we've closed more than 199K months of books for over 4,000 active clients. In that time, we built technology behind the scenes to solve one core problem: accountants spending their entire capacity on work that machines should be doing.
The cycle looked like this: We'd get a client's books in, categorize hundreds of transactions, reconcile accounts, check for exceptions, hunt down missing documentation, build the financial statements, and then do it all again next month. We did that for every client, every single month.
Then we built Meridian, an AI operating system that runs the entire month-end on its own. Now, all I have to do is review.
Onboarding cleanup in my sleep
Meridian handles the tedious, pattern-based work that I used to spend my entire day on. It categorizes transactions, reconciles accounts, flags exceptions, and produces complete financial statements in hours instead of days.
When something doesn't fit a clean pattern, it flags it for me, the same way a good accountant would handle an edge case. By the time I review the books, I've got a full close ready and nothing goes to a client without my sign-off.
I don’t spend eight hours a day reviewing the work documents anymore; I spend maybe two. I get six hours back.
Here’s a pretty cool example from last quarter: I onboarded a client that needed their 2024 through May 2026 books. It was over 30 months of books that I had to catch up on, and thousands of transactions to reconcile.
That would usually take me days to go month by month. I put it in Meridian AI, plugged in my computer, and went to sleep. I woke up and it had actually done everything. It probably worked most of the night, but the fact that I did all that work while I was asleep is pretty cool.
What I actually do with the time back
Now I spend my time working with clients on things that matter to them. Looking at gross margin trends, understanding why their inventory costs jumped, figuring out how to restructure their revenue recognition, and offering advisory relationships instead of just delivering reports.
Projects I'd been putting off for over a year are finally getting done. Things that would have made a real impact for our clients. Before, I was drowning in month-end work and now I'm not.
For example, one of my teammates got a unique investor request that didn't fit our standard template. She built it through Meridian, and now it's a reusable playbook the rest of us use. This is the thinking we should be doing. This is why we became accountants.
For the first time in my entire career in accounting, I feel like we're building something that lets accountants do what they are trained to do.
Schedule a call with the team and we'll walk you through a close.