What is Autonomous Accounting?

Autonomous accounting is here.

Accounting is undergoing a total transformation, with technology and creative service providers shaking up the traditional way of doing things.

The era of ‘autonomous accounting’ – where processes are automated for efficiency - has well and truly begun! And since we're introducing a new term - what does ‘autonomous accounting’ mean specifically?

Let's take a closer look…

🦉 Autonomous accounting is a single system that automatically generates real-time financial statements, insights and analysis, reconciliations, variance reports, and metrics whenever prompted while learning, getting faster and more accurate every day.

What is autonomous accounting?

Accounting isn't just a box to be checked off. It's the powerhouse that can drive business success and pave the path for growth. No matter how big or small your company may be, you need accurate accounting data in order to understand where you stand financially; from tracking cash flow and expenses for startups needing product-market fit to creating extensive financial statements for large corporations working with regulatory authorities.

At every stage of development, accounting plays a vital role in providing real-time financial data management, ensuring the accuracy of financial statements and reports, and establishing trust with investors and regulatory authorities.

In short, accounting is the backbone of financial intelligence, and no company can thrive without it.

Why is it SO exciting?

The role of accounting departments has evolved beyond just reporting to third parties. Today, they must be strategic partners, using financial data to provide insights, influence important decisions, and drive business improvements. But legacy accounting software often falls short, unable to provide the timely and actionable insights demanded by clients and business functions. Autonomous accounting unlocks new capabilities for accounting and finance organizations by combining a data platform with a general ledger.

Puzzle allows founders to focus on growth by providing a fast and easy way to set up a compliant foundation for taxes, fundraising diligence, and real-time financial insights.

For early-stage startups, autonomous accounting is a game-changer. Its streamlined set-up process and intuitive interface make accurate data recording, compliance, and informed financial decision-making a breeze. This scalable solution frees up founders to focus on core operations, finding product-market fit, and accelerating profitability while ensuring secure, reliable, and optimized financial management for long-term success.

The AI Revolution in Accounting: Why accountants are more important than ever.

We are at a pivotal moment where technology is converging with a state-of-the-art general ledger (which we built based on your feedback), and together they have the potential to ignite excitement in accounting, finance, and business. While AI and automation can improve accounting processes, it's important to note that they are not replacements for human expertise.

Accountants continue to play a crucial role in building trust and confidence in financial decisions by designing financial statements, developing policies and controls, interpreting and communicating results, and serving as strategic partners to executive teams and boards.

Puzzle allows client-facing accountants to do more with less, which enables them to shift their focus and provide more valuable advisory services while creating a delightful client experience.

At Puzzle, we believe in empowering companies to make informed financial decisions confidently. That's why we've built the first autonomous accounting software.

Our autonomous classification feature uses a hierarchy of rules and logic to auto-categorize transactions, but the company and accountant are always in control.

Users can run an autonomous, AI-assisted, or fully manual process and tag transactions for quick review, confirmation, or fixing.

This scalable solution helps early-stage startups establish a strong foundation for success and empowers established organizations to focus on core business operations while ensuring their financial management is secure, reliable, and optimized for long-term success.

Welcome to the era of autonomous accounting.

Autonomous accounting is like having your own 24/7 bookkeeping assistant that is constantly learning and improving with every interaction.

Picture this: A modern finance stack that can automate data ingestion and validation, categorization, reconciliations, and even generate real-time financial reports and tax packages. With Puzzle, you can make it happen.

But don’t just take our word for it. We've fine-tuned our system through a rigorous battle-testing process with hundreds of startups. And we've got the thumbs-up from finance experts, accountants, and CPAs.

Here's what you get with our modern finance stack:

🧠 Data ingestion and validation are automated. We run data integrity checks to structure, clean, and deduplicate the data before automatically feeding it into the general ledger.

📈 Real-time financial reports. Real-time statements, insights, metrics, and variance reports are instantly generated and always up-to-date

✅ Automated categorization. Every transaction is auto-tagged based on source data that is set up by system rules, logic, machine learning, or AI.

👏 Automated reconciliations. We automatically add bank statement data and include integrity checks to identify transaction duplications, errors, omissions, unsupported transactions, linked transactions, orphan transfers, and more.

💰 Auto-generated tax packages. Puzzle formats and generates the necessary reports to file your taxes.

Now, before we get you too excited, let's clear up some misconceptions:

🥁 First, Autonomous accounting keeps getting smarter with AI, but even the smartest machines can't handle every transaction perfectly. For example, transactions like "cash" and "check 123" still require human attention.

🤖 Secondly, AI can't set policy - there's still a level of subjectivity when it comes to accounting. Choosing what to expense or capitalize, for example, requires human judgment.

🚨 And while autonomous accounting can identify gaps and exceptions, it can't always solve them. That's where an expert comes in.

🤩 But don’t worry, we're constantly improving our workflows and training our AI to serve you better.

This is just the beginning.

We're excited about the possibilities for improving accounting processes through automation, including enforcing policies and automating accruals.

We believe that the power of automation and multi-basis data models will make accounting and finance more accessible to leaders throughout an organization. And while we already think it's great, we're constantly working to make it even better.

So, are you ready to join us on this journey? We can't wait to hear your feedback and make Puzzle even better for you!