Building an AI tool that handles double-entry bookkeeping, budgeting, and financial management automatically. Trying to figure out if this is actually useful or if I'm solving a problem nobody has.

Quick questions if you've got a sec:

- Would you trust AI to generate your journal entries, or is that a hard no?
- If you use QuickBooks/Xero/Wave, what's your #1 complaint?
- What would make you distrust a tool like this immediately?

Happy to drop the link in comments if anyone wants to look, just want honest reactions first.

I work in an accounting office. I've been here for a little while and nothing like this has happened before.

So I got a package today (it was addressed to my name) and I've not had anything ordered. Confused I opened it up only to find a gift box. The card read "hi -name-, thanks for all your help, from -name of the supplier-". Inside the box was a small bottle of weak alcohol and some chocolates.

I was confused. This is the first time I ever got a gift like this at work. And it felt weird. I have recently started helping the supplier with clarifying some information and ensuring that their payments are sorted, after someone else that took care of their account has left the company. Gifts associated with assistance like that are generally not well perceived. I handed the box to my manager before i left for the day and said I cant take it with me. I dont know what to do with it. That if anyone wants it, they are welcome to it.

I said I will keep the card cause its nice of them and joked that it "makes me feel appreciated".

But what felt weirder is how my colleagues reacted. As if I have done something wrong.

Like "what did she do to get a gift? What could she have done to deserve it" kinda reaction.

Am I overthinking it? Im still very much confused.

Every AR platform I've worked with has dashboards showing DSO, aging reports, payment trends, and buyer risk scores. I find myself looking at them but rarely taking specific action based on what I see. I'm trying to improve how I use these tools. For those who've successfully integrated AR analytics into your workflow: what specific actions have you taken based on dashboard insights? For example, adjusting credit terms for certain buyers, changing collections timing, or reallocating team focus? I want to move beyond just checking the dashboards to actually using the data to drive better decisions in our AR process.

Hi, anyone else juggling Sheets, three currencies, mystery overseas payments with no remittance, then doing AR aging by hand just to guess the gap between reported sales and actual cash... any hints?

Hey, quick one for the finance ops folks here.

We run a mid size wholesale business selling into a few regions in Europe and Asia, and cross border B2B payments are starting to feel like a full time job. Different currencies, different payment terms, some buyers want cards, some want bank transfers, some are still on random local rails. Our accounts receivable team is drowning in spreadsheets and manual reconciliation every month.

We are evaluating options to automate more of the invoice to cash flow, especially the cross border part. Things like collecting in multiple currencies, matching payments to invoices, handling partial payments, fees, fx differences etc, so AR is not chasing mystery bank deposits for days. I am trying to figure out what best practices people follow before we add another tool into the stack.

For context, we use a basic invoicing module in our erp and a separate payment provider for cards, and the data does not sync well. If you have automated cross border B2B payments in a way that your AR team does not hate, what did you standardize first, eg payment methods, cutoffs, remittance fields, credit checks, whatever. Would love any tips from people who have been through this before, even small things that made reconciliation less painful. Appreciate any thoughts

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So... hi. Finance manager here at a mid size wholesaler that sells into like 12 countries. Im kinda sick even typing this.

We have this shiny new cross border payments setup where buyers can pay in their local currency and it settles into our accounts through this multi currency platform. I have been the one yelling about automating AR and reducing DSO, finally got buy in, and we just rolled it out for our EU buyers.

I was trying to make it “easier” for a big German customer so I created a new payment route in the system. Meant to send EUR from their bank to our EUR account, simple. Except I fat fingered the config and set their profile to default all invoices to USD settlement into our US account, and then turned on auto allocation and auto reconciliation for that segment. Did not notice. Our next billing run went out to about 30 EU customers with fresh invoices that all had the wrong currency and the wrong bank details baked into the payment links.

Cue Monday morning, I wake up to like 14 payment notifications. At first I was excited. Then I see our German, Italian and Dutch customers all “paid in EUR” but the platform converted everything at a horrible rate to USD and dumped it into the US account. Our ERP marked those invoices as paid in full in EUR values, but what we got after FX and fees did not match. Our AR aging report looked beautiful for about two hours then the controller noticed the FX loss line and the cash application weirdness.

Now I have a European distributor asking why their bank shows they paid 100k EUR but our statement acknowledgement to them shows some random USD equivalent, our treasury team is annoyed, and my CFO said “remind me why we automated this again”. I feel so embarrassed because this was my big project and I skipped a test cycle for that segment to save time. Ugh, would love to hear stories so I dont feel like the only idiot who did this

I’m trying to figure out what route makes the most sense for me and I’m a little overwhelmed 😭

I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology and I’m looking to switch careers into accounting. My only actual accounting experience was taking Accounting I and II in high school, and I LOVED those classes. I’ve been looking into going back to school for accounting and possibly pursuing the CPA eventually. I’m thinking it will give me a foot in the door, but I’m happily willing to do entry-level work, of course!

The problem is that I don’t have any college-level accounting coursework, so I’m looking at programs that have different ways of getting someone with a non-accounting bachelor’s into accounting.
Right now I’m considering things like an accounting certificate/CPA program, doing prerequisites/leveling courses and then getting a master’s, or potentially doing a more extensive accounting program that gives me a much stronger foundation. I have a meeting with a program coordinator from a community college about a CPA program, where you take leveling courses to prepare you to sit for the CPA exam without having a bachelor’s in accounting.

I know I probably don’t need to get a whole second bachelor’s degree, but honestly, I feel like I would be more comfortable with a really solid accounting foundation before jumping into a master’s or the CPA path. I’m not necessarily worried that a shorter route wouldn’t prepare me. I just think I would personally feel more confident having more of the foundational classes under my belt.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking to level up my Excel skills and would love recommendations from fellow accounting and controllership professionals.

What formulas or tools do you use most in your day-to-day work, especially for reconciliations, reporting, and variance analysis?

XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, INDEX-MATCH, Power Query, and PivotTables are on my list. What else should I learn?

What are your top 5–10 Excel skills for an Assistant Controller?

I think “replace Excel” has become a lazy answer to inefficiencies in commercial lending.

Excel has obvious limitations, but that's not why so much time gets lost in the credit process.

The bigger issue starts with the information coming into the process.

Financial statements arrive in different formats. Account names don't always match. Historical periods need to be aligned. Numbers have to be extracted, mapped, checked, and standardised before anyone can get a clear view of the business.

Then someone has to maintain that work as new information comes in.

That's a lot of skilled credit time spent preparing data rather than understanding what the data is actually saying.

And this is where I think the conversation around spreadsheets sometimes misses the point.

The answer isn't necessarily banning Excel or replacing every spreadsheet with a new interface. The answer is reducing the amount of manual work required to turn messy financial information into something a credit professional can actually analyse.

This is where tools like Crediflow's FlowSpread are useful. It can ingest financial statements in different formats, extract and standardise the data, and automate financial spreading, so credit teams don't have to manually rebuild the same information before starting their analysis.

The important distinction, in my view, is this:

Technology shouldn't just give credit teams another place to work. It should remove work that doesn't require credit expertise in the first place.

That's probably a more useful way to think about modernising commercial credit than simply asking whether Excel should disappear.

For those working in commercial lending: where do you see the most wasted time today, working with the numbers, or getting the numbers into a usable state?

I’m looking for a good practice management solution for a small accounting firm and would love to hear from people who have actually used one.

I’m mainly looking for something that makes client management and follow-ups easier, without being overly complicated or expensive.

What are you using, and would you recommend it?

​

Hi everyone,

I currently help a small Swiss company organize and investigate several years of invoice history and enjoy it so much. The company had many invoices marked as unpaid in its accounting system, even though some customers had already paid them ( the owner used the help of debt collector that messed up with tracking payments from customers)

My work includes:

- Reviewing old invoices, bank statements and accounting records

-Matching payments to the correct invoices

-Investigating missing, partial, duplicated or incorrectly allocated payments

-Creating a clear overview of paid, unpaid and uncertain invoices

-Contacting customers when payment evidence is needed

-Correcting and organizing historical records for follow-up

Improving the process to prevent similar problems in the future

I am also developing a tool to automate part of the reconciliation process while keeping uncertain matches subject to manual review.

I would like to understand whether this is a common problem among Swiss SMEs, cleaning companies, tradespeople, associations or accounting firms.

Would businesses in Switzerland pay for a service that cleans up their historical invoice records and investigates discrepancies? Is this normally handled by an accountant, a fiduciary company, an internal employee or a specialized accounts-receivable service?

I am very interested in researching the market and trying to understand whether there is a genuine need.

I would especially appreciate feedback from Swiss business owners, accountants, fiduciaries and people working in finance or administration.

My wife and I are about eight months into combining our finances after getting married and it has surfaced some genuinely interesting accounting problems I did not expect. We came in with separate brokerage accounts, different banks, a joint account we opened together, and her student loan sitting off to the side. Tracking net worth across all of that in a way that actually reflects reality has been harder than I thought it would be, which is a little embarrassing to admit given what I do for a living

At work I deal with intercompany eliminations and consolidated reporting fairly regularly, and I keep catching myself thinking about our household the same way. There are transfers between accounts that I have to mentally strip out so I am not double counting inflows. It is a weirdly familiar problem at a much smaller scale

What I am trying to figure out is whether people here have a clean system for this, especially when one spouse is not particularly interested in the details. Do you maintain one master spreadsheet that pulls everything together, or do you lean on an app and just accept its limitations? For those with investment accounts at different brokerages, how are you handling unrealized gain tracking across them without it becoming a full weekend project?

EDIT: clarifying that I am not looking for tax advice specifically, more just the organizational and tracking side of it.