What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #88

Author

Jason Staats
June 22, 2023

šŸ’”How To Bolt A Chat Assistant To Your Ledger

This morning Digits launched ā€œDigits AIā€ a free chat assistant for your QuickBooks ledger. Is this a thing I would actually want, you ask? Will this change my life? Is this the year I fall in love with a QuickBooks file, akin to Theodore Twombley in the movie Her?

Maybe, TBD, and probably not yet but weā€™re getting close.

Astute observers of tech trends are quick to point out people were bolting natural language processing to ledgers 5 years ago, and itā€™s true. You also got a staph infection from a VR thing in a strip mall when you were 14. That doesnā€™t make the Apple Vision Pro any less interesting.

So is it any good?

What It Does: It looks to have access to account, customer, and vendor level data. Interestingly it gives you little embedded charts as well, rather than vanilla text output.

What It Doesnā€™t Do: It is not the wild west that ChatGPT is. It isnā€™t an unlimited universe from which you can live out your ledger-based fantasies. While it does draw on a general knowledgebase of accounting terminology, it doesnā€™t have access to ChatGPTā€™s general knowledge, or the ability to manipulate data in a freeform way.

How Security Works: The data's already living on Digits' server, what we want to know is how it interacts with public AI models. Here's the general approach, as I can work out from the press release:

1 ) The prompts are not trained into the model
2 ) Prompts are anonymized, and not able to be tied back to any individual/company
3 ) Prompt are also "obfuscated", likely "pseudonymisation", replacing identifying words with a non-identifying substitute.

In some situations you need to recover a redacted detail in prompt. For example the prompt: "bob has 4 cats", can be pseudonymised as "VO#OIV@R has 4 NLB#L$J@"

The pseudonymised prompt goes to the language model, so nobody can learn how many cats bob has, but on Digit's servers they know bob = VO#OIV@R and cats = NLB#L$J@, and the merged result is returned to the user.

But the million dollar question: in what ways can chat be helpful to business owners, and in what ways can be helpful to advisors. Weā€™re all still feeling around in the dark here, trying to work out how best to leverage the tech.

Theyā€™ve got more improvements on the way: the ability to fetch balance sheets and income statements, mobile support, class and location support, follow-up questions.

But step #1 is getting this stuff into as many peopleā€™s hands as possible, to see what we can make of it. I for one, am a staunch supporter of anyone building AI tech for us accountants. So ten points to Digits.

If you want to take it for a spin you can connect up to 5 client QB accounts for free. Most interesting to me: what does the perfect version of this look like to you? How would you use it?

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