Across industries and growth stages, accounting and finance teams are under pressure to move faster and scale smarter. On every project, Siegfried professionals help eliminate the manual, time-consuming tasks that often limit strategic capacity, creating the opportunity for our clients to reflect and focus on what matters most. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool in making this possible.
After helping an AI startup build out their accounting function, Duncan, a Senior Manager in Chicago, pivoted to process enhancement and automation initiatives – serving the Vice President of Accounting’s goal of minimizing the manual lift of the month-end close. While the client was using FloQast and NetSuite for some time savings, the real impact came when Duncan dove into FloQast Transform – an agent-building platform.
Duncan built out agents to allocate and post journal entries for facilities, corporate engineering, corporate events, people services, GPU use, and the CEO’s monthly credit card report. These agents took routine tasks and reduced time to complete from hours, or even days, to minutes.
“My work building agents to improve the month-end close process with AI made it so that I could seamlessly transition off the client while their accounting department was still in a growth phase,” Duncan explained. “AI agents are a big part of accounting’s future. You have so many accounting professionals doing mundane tasks when they could be spending a day or two building an agent and then focusing on more important, strategic projects.”
Duncan additionally used Generative AI as a thought partner and second perspective on general accounting topics. For example, the client went through a transaction where they purchased a new asset. Duncan asked Generative AI what he was missing in terms of acquisition accounting and what decisions AI would make if it were an expert in the area. Generative AI not only helped him get up to speed, but it posted an impressive, four-page-long accounting memo for the audit within 30 minutes.
“The company was small, and I was touching everything, which meant a lot of new territory,” shared Duncan. “AI helped me do very pointed, specific technical accounting research quickly, giving me a baseline understanding – whether it be for my day-to-day activities or going into conversations with the CAO.”
In summary, Duncan elevated with AI by:
- Building several FloQast Transform agents that easily completed tedious month-end close tasks.
- Reducing the manual burden of a small and fast-growing accounting department.
- Performing client-specific technical accounting research.
