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AI can now do a lot of bookkeeping that used to need a person: read a receipt, check the VAT treatment, match it to the bank, code it correctly. So the question for every firm has shifted from "can AI do bookkeeping?" to "where does the accountant still fit?"

This session answers that honestly. When can you trust AI to publish a transaction without review? When do you need a human, and how do you tell the difference in a way that holds up for compliance and for clients? We will look at what AI is genuinely good at, where it still gets things wrong, and the practical checks that decide which work is safe to automate. You will leave with a clearer view of how to use AI in your practice without losing control of quality, accuracy or compliance.

In this webinar Reuben Steenkamp will cover the following topics:

• Why bookkeeping has been hard to automate: it is context-dependent. The same transaction can be a prepayment, a reverse charge, or need splitting, and the ledger alone never tells you which.
• What changed: the shift from OCR-plus-rules to reasoning models that read unstructured data and make a judgement.
• The real risks in a high-trust domain: AI is probabilistic, can behave like a black box, and raises data security questions.
• Where the human fits: reviewing by exception, using deterministic checks (legibility, completeness, historical consistency) to decide what is safe to publish, and demanding explainability so every decision can be audited.
• What this does to the role: absorbing rising compliance volume, growing clients without growing headcount at the same rate, and moving close from month-end toward real-time 

 By attending this session, you will be able to:

• Explain why bookkeeping resisted automation, and what reasoning models changed.
• Identify the genuine risks of AI in accounting, beyond the hype on either side.
• Judge when AI output can be trusted and when it needs a human in the loop.
• Apply simple checks to decide which work in your practice is safe to automate.
• Describe how the accountant's role shifts from doing the work to reviewing exceptions and advising.

This webinar will be of interest to bookkeepers, practice accountants, outsourcing and bookkeeping team leads, and practice owners. Useful at any level of AI experience, since the focus is judgement rather than tooling.

Course Level: Intermediate