# AI in accounting: 7 proven plays for a 3x faster close Today’s accounting teams aren’t just closing the books — they’re using AI to drive business growth. Get their blueprint in our guide to accounting automation. **URL Source:** https://www.brex.com/resources/unlock-value-with-ai-powered-accounting --- ### Text AI in accounting: 7 proven plays for a 3x faster close [Download PDF](https://brand.brex.com/m/186620c000e0231c/original/Brex_AI-powered-accounting-7-ways-leaders-unlock-value.pdf) ### Image ### The key to unlocking new business growth? Automated accounting. ### The reality: manual processes are killing productivity. ### AI-powered accounting is already becoming the new standard. Between increased operational complexity and fewer professionals to do the work, finance teams are stretched thin, leaving little room for advancing core business objectives. That’s why AI-powered automation is a clear path to improvement. If you ask any CFO whether they’d rather grow fast or efficiently, the answer is both,” says Ben Gammell, CFO at Brex. “Intelligent automation puts you on the path to achieve both simultaneously. The longer you wait to automate and reduce workloads, the more technical debt and complexity you’re creating for yourself down the road." This shift toward automation isn't just happening at innovative companies like SeatGeek and Pramand — it's an industry-wide movement: - [AI adoption in finance](https://www.brex.com/journal/cfos-need-an-ai-strategy) is a top priority for CFOs in 2025, along with efficient growth and improving data quality, according to Gartner. - 41% of accountants are using AI to automate their own workflows, per KarbonHQ’s [State of AI in Accounting Report 2025](https://karbonhq.com/resources/state-of-ai-accounting-report-2025). - 54% of respondents in the 2024 Intuit QuickBooks [Accountant Technology Survey](https://www.firmofthefuture.com/news/accountant-tech-survey-2024/) plan to increase automation investments in the coming months. Venture capitalists are also betting big on accounting automation. “We think there’s a huge opportunity to automate a lot of the workflow and let the same accounting firms take twice as many clients,” Marc Bhargava, Managing Director at VC firm General Catalyst, said in a 2025 [Wall Street Journal article](https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-has-venture-investors-excited-about-yes-accounting-firms-3b9b3226). “The idea is not to cut people with AI, the idea is to enable them to do two to three times the work.” “The idea is not to cut people with AI, the idea is to enable them to do two to three times the work.” The question is no longer whether you should automate accounting with AI or even when. It’s about what your business stands to lose if accounting continues to live in spreadsheet hell and buried in manual work. Here’s what’s preventing accounting automation today. ### Barriers to efficiency — complex processes and disparate systems. ### Embracing automation as a strategic mindset. Automating accounting isn’t about overhauling everything — it’s about enhancing the way finance teams already operate. If you were building an accounting function from scratch today, would you design it around manual data entry, endless reconciliations, and reactive reporting? Or would you leverage automation, AI, and process standardization to create a scalable, data-driven foundation for the future? The companies that embrace AI and automation as a core philosophy, not just a process improvement, will be the ones that scale efficiently and make better, faster decisions. Finance leaders with a modern accounting automation philosophy: - **See manual work as a blocker to growth.** The more time your team spends on repetitive tasks, the less bandwidth they have for strategic decision-making. - **Trust automation as an enhancement, not a replacement.** AI and automation aren’t about removing human judgment — they’re about enabling finance teams to focus on higher-value work. - **Take a data-first approach.** Standardizing processes that ensure clean, structured data means fewer errors and better insights that ripple across the entire business. - **Foster a culture of continuous improvement.** Moving away from the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality ensures your team can evolve with changing business needs. The philosophy aspect is often a harder sell than the technical implementation because it requires changing mindsets and established behaviors. “With Brex’s automated reconciliation and expense reporting across entities, Lemonade’s finance team is now able to close the books in a fraction of the time, which allows us to focus on analyzing and optimizing spend, instead of preparing and reconciling it.” — Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller at [Lemonade](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/lemonade) ![Headshot of Mike Duffy](https://brand.brex.com/transform/6f023aaf-6760-48ef-8d2d-7981adbd8462/Accounting-automation_Lemonade) ### Successful accounting automation starts with expense automation. So where do you start with accounting automation? Start by understanding what you can realistically automate with AI to ensure accuracy at every step. You need clean, accurate data before it hits your general ledger (GL) — and that starts with capturing spend data at the source through integrated cards, travel, and expense management. The general ledger is the backbone of your financial reporting, but manually reviewing and coding transactions is time-consuming and error-prone. By automating expense categorization and approval workflows _before_ data reaches your ERP, you can reduce errors and streamline the entire process. Juan Miguel Salazar Muñoz, Controlling Analyst at [Incode](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/incode): “With multiple systems for cards, travel, and reimbursements, it was impossible to get a clear view of our spending. We had to manually input everything into our ERP — creating inefficiencies and adding to our workload.” This technology sprawl also affects reimbursements. Juan said Incode had to manually issue every reimbursement through payroll, which was a 16-step process that added to the team’s workload. For Signifyd, similar manual bottlenecks created friction throughout the organization. “Our previous expense tool made it difficult for employees to submit expenses and get the necessary approvals, so reimbursement could take weeks,” said Ty Barton, Accounting Manager at [Signifyd](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/signifyd). “The accounting department was getting a lot of negative feedback in terms of employee satisfaction.” Ultimately, AI-powered expense automation improves accounting and unlocks the visibility, agility, and decision-making that drives the business forward. “The transparency that Brex provides our team is unparalleled. Our finance partners are ecstatic to be able to see how spend is trending at any point in time,” said Jerome Barley, Head of Global Travel & Expense at [DoorDash](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/doordash). Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller at [Lemonade](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/lemonade), says: “With Brex’s automated reconciliation and expense reporting across entities, Lemonade’s finance team is able to close the books in a fraction of the time, which allows us to focus on analyzing and optimizing spend, instead of preparing and reconciling it.” Katherine Spillane, assistant controller at [Avenue One](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/avenue-one), adds: “With Brex, we’re not just automating — we’re driving company-wide accuracy. With transactions automatically synced across systems, the finance team has the bandwidth to focus on outcomes and strategy for continued growth.” 7 ways AI-powered accounting drives value The right automation strategy can transform finance. These are the top areas AI-powered automation is driving impact. **1. Automated document collection** **Why it matters: **Employees waste time manually collecting and submitting documentation, only to have finance teams spend countless hours chasing missing receipts and validating expenses. **How AI can help:** Automatically capture and process receipts as transactions occur, and machine learning algorithms populate memos, assign departments, projects, and GL codes automatically. **Where to start:** Integrate your card and expense management platform to auto-capture receipts at purchase and eliminate manual data entry with AI-powered smart coding and memo generation. **Impact: **Save 300+ hours every year on manual expense tasks. **2. Accelerated expense reconciliation** **Why it matters: **Manual reconciliation is time-consuming and error-prone, leading to delays in closing the books. **How AI can help: **Automate transaction categorization, receipt matching, and coding to ensure accuracy while eliminating tedious data entry. **Where to start: **Leverage** **OCR technology to match receipts in any language or currency. Integrate corporate cards, travel, expense management, and bill pay solutions for richer data that enables 100% reconciliation. **Impact: **Prepare** **66% of expenses entirely with automations. **3. Automated reviews and approvals** **Why it matters: **Cumbersome manual reviews create bottlenecks and delay financial processes. **How AI can help: **Auto-approve in-policy expenses and route exceptions to the right approvers instantly with minimal human intervention. **Where to start:** Set up AI-powered routing to ensure expenses and invoices move efficiently through approvals with clear audit trails, focusing only on necessary reviews. **Impact:** Complete expense review 4x faster. **4. Increased data accuracy** **Why it matters: **Manual data entry and processing inherently introduce human error, which can lead to costly mistakes, inaccurate reporting, compliance issues, and poor business decisions. **How AI can help: **Automatically detect anomalies, inconsistencies, and potential errors in real-time before they impact your financial records. Machine learning algorithms also continuously improve accuracy by learning from historical data patterns. **Where to start: **Set up intelligent rules and validation checks that flag potential issues for review, and reduce human intervention by offloading expense tasks to AI assistants. **Impact:** Reduce errors by up to 90%. **5. Accelerated month-end close** **Why it matters:** The month-end close process traditionally creates a cyclical bottleneck that strains finance teams, delays financial reporting, and diverts resources from strategic activities. **How AI can help: **Automated transaction categorization, real-time anomaly detection, pre-populated reconciliations, and intelligent transaction matching help you close the books 3x faster*. **Where to start: **Integrate your expense automation solution with your ERP, and set up automated reconciliation workflows that run throughout the month to distribute workload evenly. **Impact:** Enable a continuous close instead of grinding at the end of every month. **6. Faster payment processing** **Why it matters: **Manually processing an invoice can take days or even weeks, which slows down payments, increases the risk of fraud, and drives up costs. **How AI can help: **Automated invoice processing captures, codes, and routes a bill automatically, eliminating the need for manual data entry, reducing processing costs. **Where to start: **Consolidate** **bill pay, purchase cards, and expense management onto one platform, and leverage AI-powered invoice scanning and intelligent approval routing. **Impact: **Reduce processing costs by 90%. **7. Real-time financial visibility** **Why it matters: **Many ERP “integrations” fail to accommodate custom workflows, leading to manual workarounds. True automation eliminates these inefficiencies, ensuring real-time data syncing and accurate financial reporting. **How AI can help:** AI-generated suggestions and smart expense classification improve how data gets to your ERP. **Where to start: **Use native integrations for NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and others that automate GL coding, allow custom rules, and bi-directionally sync data in real time. **Impact: **Get a reliable, single source of truth you can confidently act on. ### Best practices: What are top finance leaders automating? SeatGeek: AI-led expense documentation reduces overhead by 95%. Through accounting automation with Brex, SeatGeek’s achieved a 99% employee compliance rate and accelerated its documentation processes by 10x. “Brex reduces our month-end close effort in a more compliant way, while helping FP&A administer budgets in real time instead of weeks after the fact," Teddy says. The results are significant: auto-coding 99.7% of transactions and automating receipts, memos, and categorization has slashed documentation and compliance time from 22 hours to just 2 hours. Month-end close often takes just 15 minutes to complete. “Brex is helping us control expenses while being more efficient with our number one resource — our employees,” Collins explains. "We reduced finance overhead for expense management by about 95% within 6 months of onboarding. This is how you get ahead.” Pramand: Automated multi-entity accounting enables a 2.5x faster close. Jessica Ray says Brex AI vastly improved Pramand’s expense management and reduced its monthly close process from 3 weeks to 6 days. Additionally, closing the books for Pramand’s multiple business entities is no longer so resource-intensive. “I used to manage our multi-entity spending by taking every expense line and invoicing the other company,” she explains. “With Brex, those charges go directly to our other entity and I can skip the manual invoicing workaround. “Brex makes it extremely easy to separate and manage multiple entities under one parent company. It scales with our company, which makes it such a powerful solution.” Manually creating and uploading journal entries to the ERP are also things of the past, Jessica says. “Brex’s NetSuite integration has been seamless and saves us a ton of time. It gives us back the bandwidth to focus on driving the company forward.” Scentbird: AI-suggested rules and anomaly detection deliver 2x faster accounting. Subscription-based fragrance company [Scentbird](https://www.brex.com/resources/customer/scentbird) used to spend countless hours fixing data. Each of its brands and global locations required custom accounting codes, which it couldn’t sync with its ERP and resulted in frequent errors. “It would take hours of investigation just to figure out the issue when expenses didn’t upload to NetSuite correctly,” said Amber Papp, VP of Finance at Scentbird. So how did Scentbird streamline the coding process and eliminate those errors? “Brex’s custom rules have been super helpful. Not only can we create them, but Brex also uses AI to suggest additional rules and settings,” Amber shared. “Brex even recommended custom rules we hadn’t thought of, making the process even smoother.” A seamless integration with NetSuite further simplified the month-end close. “Brex syncs directly with NetSuite. If something doesn’t reconcile, Brex highlights the issue and proposes a resolution. In a recent month, only two expenses needed a fix, and it just took minutes,” Amber added. “We are completing expenses and accounting twice as fast with Brex.” ### Automate your accounting with Brex. Whatever your business’s growth strategy for 2025, an AI-powered [accounting automation solution](https://www.brex.com/platform/accounting-automation) will help you achieve it faster. Teddy Collins sees it as a powerful way to unlock financial data, turning insights into smarter decisions that drive the business forward. “As a technology company, we have a lot of data,” Teddy says. “Our job is to leverage that data to improve our reporting and forecasts, ultimately leading to better business decisions. It starts with lean processes and high-quality financial and operational data. Brex automates 99.7% of our transactions with custom rules. By automating receipts, memos, and category coding, Brex makes closing the books 10 times faster — transforming how we work.” We designed our platform to intelligently weave accounting into every product and financial process — making it a core feature, not just a downstream process. With corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, business banking, and travel solutions integrated into one global, AI-powered [spend management solution](https://www.brex.com/product/spend-management), Brex empowers over 30,000 finance teams to streamline spend accounting by preparing and exporting journal entries with ease. Leveraging Brex’s automation and rich data, teams can efficiently track and organize their accounting journal entries in one central place — before they hit their ERPs. That’s how Brex customers complete expense reviews **4x faster** and close the books **3x faster***. [Get started with Brex today](https://www.brex.com/signup) and transform your financial operations into a strategic advantage that fuels efficient business growth. ![Dashboard screen of Brex](https://brand.brex.com/transform/217cb180-c333-407d-9c1d-856be1d390ea/Accounting-screen_accounting-ebook_inline) _* Based on internal metrics from December 2024. Past performance does not guarantee future results, which may vary._ _Brex intends to provide accurate information but cannot guarantee this content is current, correct, or complete._