Automating the Profession That Trained Me

The most valuable thing a Chartered Accountant does takes about four hours a month. The rest is chasing.

I know because I did the chasing for twenty years. Compliance calendars kept in someone's head. Documents followed over WhatsApp, one reminder at a time. The same reconciliations, the same month, the same client who sends the same file late. None of that is accounting. It is the scaffolding we built around accounting because we are human. We forget, so we make calendars. We do not trust the file arrived, so we ask three times.

A machine does not forget. A machine does not need to be reminded to remind someone.

Where the hours actually go

Ask any practising CA where their week went and they will not say "judgment." They will say follow-ups. Deadlines tracked across spreadsheets and memory. Filings that are ninety percent the same every quarter and still done by hand every quarter. The knowledge is rare. The work around the knowledge is repetitive, and repetition is exactly what a system should absorb.

This is the thread I keep pulling. The accountant sits on the richest data in the entire business and spends the day on logistics instead of intelligence.

The method, not the magic

I did not start Speed CA by asking what features to add. I started the way I start everything: write the goal in one sentence, list the steps, then attack the list. Is this step necessary, or is it how we have always done it? Most steps do not survive the question. What remains is the short honest path, and that is the only thing worth automating.

A five-day month-end close became two days that way. Not by putting software on top of the old process. By removing most of the process first.

Built by a CA, for CAs

Speed CA is a practice platform for Chartered Accountants in India, and I am building it from inside the work, not from a slide deck about the work. Every step it removes is a step I have done ten thousand times myself. It lives at ai2all.ai.

I am not trying to replace the judgment. That four hours a month is the whole profession. I am trying to give it back the rest of the week.

What part of your week is scaffolding, and what would you do with the time if it were gone?