Where Should AI Help in Your Accounting Practice?

The most common mistake in AI adoption is asking ‘what can AI do?’ rather than ‘what problem am I trying to solve?’ Every accounting practice operates differently. Your bottlenecks are unique to your service offerings, your client base, and your workflows. Before you evaluate any AI tool, you need to identify where you’re losing time and where that time matters most.

This blog is part of our series on how accountants get real value from AI.

This means stepping back and asking where does my practice spend effort on repeatable, manual tasks that could be handled more efficiently? Where do clients cause delays because they can’t organise information? Where does compliance work consume disproportionate time? The answers to these questions determine where AI creates real value for your specific practice.

The principle: AI amplifies what’s already there

AI is an amplifier. It makes fast things faster and slow things slower. It makes high-quality processes more productive and low-quality processes more consistently bad. Before investing time in AI tools, invest time in understanding your own workflows. Where are the bottlenecks? Where does time disappear? Where are your team members spending effort on tasks that a well-configured system could handle?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you have your starting point.

Two specific bottlenecks where AI delivers measurable value

Across accounting practices, two recurring bottlenecks create opportunities for AI to solve problems:

Bottleneck 1: Payroll onboarding consumes disproportionate time

When a new employee joins a company, the employer (or you, as the bureau) must collect specific information. In most practices, this is a manual process. You have to reach out and contact the new starter to collect details, the new starter responds (sometimes after many reminders have been sent out), you verify the information and enter it into the payroll system. The entire cycle typically takes 5-7 days, with lots of opportunities for error.

This means that new starters don’t have information immediately. Email responses are slow or incomplete, you have to constantly chase missing information, re-enter data, and verify documents. This can lead to delayed submissions, incorrect tax codes, missing information, and duplicate data entries.

This is a workflow problem that (luckily) AI can solve.

How BrightPay’s onboarding AI assistant, Oscar, eliminates payroll onboarding friction

Oscar is BrightPay’s AI employee onboarding assistant. Rather than sending forms or calling up and chasing new hires, Oscar handles it all but sending the new starter a WhatsApp message. Oscar then guides them through a secure onboarding process to collect everything needed for payroll, including personal details, NI number, bank details, tax information, and documents like P45s. Anything confidential is sent through a secure online portal for an additional layer of security.

Oscar validates the information as it comes in, follows up automatically if anything is missing, and sends the completed data to BrightPay for review. Nothing is added until you approve it. The process works 24/7, so Oscar engages and collects data whenever a new starter is ready, regardless of what hour of the day it is.

The result is that new starter onboarding reduces from 5-7 days to approximately 1.5 hours, with less than 5 minutes of your team’s involvement. Clients experience faster, more reliable service. on your end, it means fewer corrections, less queries, and more time to allocate to higher-value work. For further information on how Oscar can save you time, check out our blog on why payroll onboarding still takes a week (and why it should only take hours).

Bottleneck 2: MTD IT quarterly data collection

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD IT) is now live for sole traders and landlords with gross income over £50,000 per annum. HMRC requires quarterly submissions of income and expenses data, with submission deadlines on the 7th of August, the 7th of November, the 7th of February, and the 7th of May each year.

For bookkeepers, this means quarterly client data collection becomes a recurring, mandatory cycle. In a typical quarterly MTD IT cycle, a bookkeeper must request documents from clients, wait for responses, organise documents by category, extract relevant figures, validate, identify discrepancies, chase clients for missing information, and finally prepare the submission data. Each client represents multiple back-and-forth exchanges that can easily start to pile up.

This is a workflow problem as clients don’t have documents organised, they don’t know what constitutes an allowable expense, and they forget what they’ve already submitted. Bookkeepers can sometimes spend more time managing client expectations and chasing missing information than they do on actual accounting work.

How BrightBooks' document capture tool eliminates MTD IT quarterly friction

BrightBooks' document capture tool is purpose-built for MTD ITSA compliance. Rather than requesting documents manually and extracting data yourself, you have a secure MTD app for clients to submit quarterly documents. Clients photograph receipts and invoices on their mobile phones. BrightBooks' document capture tool reads these documents, extracts the relevant financial data (amounts, dates, categories), validates the data against MTD IT requirements, and flags anomalies or missing information.

The documents are processed automatically, with VAT split and data extracted ready for review in BrightBooks. The result is clean, validated data that arrives in your bookkeeping system ready for submission, without manual data entry or chasing clients.

If you’re using a practice management tool, like BrightManager, clients experience a simple, secure process. You can set up the system so that when clients don’t send over everything you needed from them, you can tell the system what you’re missing and it’ll chase up the client for you until they send over the missing files. No manual chasing or delays caused by missing information. With both of these solutions, your clients experience a more professional, streamlined service. You then gain breathing room to proactively discuss expense optimisation, growth strategies, or financial planning.

Identify your firm’s bottleneck, then deploy the right AI solution

Not every practice does payroll work and not every practice handles MTD ITSA quarterly submissions. Your bottlenecks are specific to your service offerings.

But if payroll onboarding is consuming your team’s time, Oscar eliminates it. If MTD IT quarterly data collection is your bottleneck, BrightBooks' document capture tool automates it. The key is starting with the question that we mentioned at the beginning of this article: What problem am I trying to solve? Once you’ve identified your specific bottleneck, you have your starting point. And that’s where AI creates real value, not in chasing every new capability, but in addressing the specific problems in your practice.

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.