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For years, automating accounting meant speeding up individual tasks — faster data entry, quicker bank rules. The shift now underway is bigger than that. When you ingest source data with enough context, you can automate the work downstream of it, in real time, as it happens. An invoice no longer just gets captured and coded: the system can recognise that it needs a prepayment, an accrual, a fixed-asset addition or a deferral, make that adjustment as the document lands rather than parking it for month-end, and build the supporting schedule at the same time. Do that across every transaction and your working papers stop being a year-end job — they assemble themselves from the raw data as the year goes on. This session walks through how that actually works, from an invoice arriving to a finished, audit-ready working papers pack.

In this session Sam Methold will cover the following topics: 

• From task automation to workflow automation — why automating bits of bookkeeping has been possible for years, and what context-rich data ingestion changes about automating the whole workflow downstream of it. 
   
• Invoices, end to end — how a source document is captured, coded and VAT-treated automatically, with the accountant reviewing by exception rather than processing every item. 
   
• Adjustments in real time — how prepayments, accruals, fixed assets and deferrals can be detected from source documents as they arrive, rather than deferred to a month-end task. 
   
• Schedules that build themselves — how the supporting schedule is created the moment a transaction posts, so working papers come straight from the underlying data, with an immutable audit trail behind every figure. 
   
• What it means for the practice — a close that moves toward real-time, review by exception. 

By attending this session, you will be able to:

• Explain the shift from automating individual tasks to automating whole workflows, and what makes it possible now.
• Describe how an invoice can move from capture to a posted, correctly adjusted transaction with no re-keying.
• Identify which accounting adjustments — e.g. prepayments, accruals, fixed assets, deferrals — can be detected and made in real time from source data, versus which require additional historical context
• See how supporting schedules and working papers can be generated from the raw data as the year progresses, rather than assembled at year-end.
• Plan how your practice could shift effort from preparing the numbers to reviewing them and take on more compliance volume without matching headcount.

This session will be of most interest to practice accountants, bookkeepers, accounts-prep and year-end teams, outsourcing and offshore team leads, and practice owners. Useful at any level of AI experience — the focus is the workflow and what it changes, not any single tool.

Course level: Intermediate