A practical guide to getting started, written for people who run accounting and bookkeeping firms.
You do not need to be technical. Using AI is about as complicated as talking to a co-worker. Twenty minutes from now you will have used it, and you will have seen how it could fit into your day.
You have been hearing about this since 2023. Every conference had a session on it. Every software company you work with sent an email about it. And you still have not really used it, or you tried it once, got something generic back, and quietly decided it was oversold.
That is the normal experience. Almost everyone in this profession is in the same place, including plenty of people who talk like they are not.
There are two reasons it has not clicked, and neither of them is you.
Most of what has been written about this assumes you already use it. It skips the part where someone explains what it actually is and jumps to tips for people who are already fluent. And the examples that get all the attention are enormous - a global firm automating something across forty offices - which tells you nothing about what to do on a Tuesday in a firm with nine people.
So here is a guide that starts where you actually are. It takes about twenty minutes and there is no jargon in it. We will walk you through the first thing to try, and then give you a set of prompts you can copy and use right away, so you can get comfortable and start working this into your day.
Every program you have ever used required you to know the steps. Which menu, which button, which screen, in what order. If you did not know the steps, the software could not help you. And let us be honest - learning a new system has usually meant hours of clicking around, a manual nobody reads, and a fair amount of frustration before it starts paying off.
This is the first software that works the other way around. It is as simple as having a conversation.
You say what you are trying to do, in your own words. It responds. You tell it what is not quite right. It adjusts. You go back and forth until you have what you need, the same way you would with a person.
That is the whole reason this feels different from anything that came before. Not because of what is happening inside it, but because talking to it feels like talking to someone.
Which is exactly how to think about it.
They have read more than anyone you know. They work quickly, they never get tired, and they will cheerfully take on the parts of the job nobody else wants.
And it is their first day. They have never seen your firm, never met your clients, and have no idea how you like anything done.
A fair question, and the answer is broader than most people expect.
You have a conversation with it, and it understands what you are asking well enough to genuinely help. It can write an email, a letter, or a proposal. It can build you a spreadsheet and explain the formulas so you can change them later. It can take something long and confusing and put it in plain language. It can listen to you describe how you do something, out loud and out of order, and turn that into a written procedure your next hire could follow. It can help you think through a decision you have been sitting on. It can take something you already wrote and make it shorter, or warmer, or firmer.
None of that requires you to learn anything except how to describe what you want. Which you already know how to do, because you do it every day with the people who work for you.
Think about what you would actually do with someone like that.
You would not expect them to know anything on day one. Not because they are not capable. Because they have never worked here. The best bookkeeper you could hire still would not know your close checklist, your clients, or how you like a letter to sound.
So the first thing you do is tell them. Who this is for. What you are trying to accomplish. What you have already tried. What a good version looks like. If you have an example of the thing done right, you hand it over and say make it like this.
Nobody hires someone and says "write a letter" with nothing else. But that is almost exactly what most people do the first time they try one of these tools. They type one line, get something generic, and conclude it is not very good.
It gave them what anyone would have given them.
Then they take a run at it, and you read what they did. You would not send a new hire's first draft straight to a client without looking at it. Same here. Read it the way you would read anything from someone in their first week.
Then you tell them what to change. Too long. Too formal. You missed the part about the deadline. She already knows all this, cut the first paragraph.
This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is where the good work actually happens. Most people read the first answer, decide it is roughly seventy percent right, and either use it anyway or give up. The second and third rounds are the entire point.
After a few rounds, they are good at it. They understand what you want and they get there faster. This is also why the first few tries feel slower than just doing it yourself. They are. You are training someone.
The whole rule, if you only remember one thing: tell it what you would tell a person.
Who it is for. What you need. What good looks like. What to avoid.
One more thing about your new hire, and it is worth knowing before you start. They will never tell you they are unsure. A real person says "let me double-check that." This will hand you a confident, well-organized answer whether it knows or is guessing, and it sounds exactly the same either way. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is the reason you read the work.
The public versions of these tools are not a private place. Client names, Social Security numbers, account numbers, tax returns, payroll detail - none of that goes in.
The practical version is easier than it sounds, because you can almost always describe a situation without the identifying details. "A client who took a large distribution last year and did not make estimated payments" works perfectly well. Their name and their numbers add nothing to what you are asking.
This will not be the rule forever. A number of companies are actively building tools for exactly this - versions where an accountant can put sensitive client information in without any risk of it being shared or leaked. Those are coming, and some are already here. But today, in the tools on this page, it is critical that you keep client information out.
Everything else in this guide works fine within that rule, and there is more of it than you would think.
Both tools have a microphone button. Press it and just talk.
Not only is this faster than typing for almost everyone, it also quietly makes you better at using it. When people type, they compress. They write six words and hit enter. When people talk, they explain - the way they would to someone standing in their doorway. All that extra explanation is precisely what produces a better answer.
So the easiest way to improve your results is not a technique. It is to stop typing and start talking.
There are two that most small firms end up using: ChatGPT and Claude. For everything on this page they work close enough to identically that you cannot really get this wrong. Pick either one to start, or try both and see which you prefer.
One practical note before you start: create a free account with whichever one you pick. Both are free, it takes about a minute, and it gives you everything on this page including the microphone button.
Once you are in, you will see a chat window, and a small dropdown with a few different options in it. That is the model - essentially, which version of the assistant you are talking to. Do not overthink it. Each tool describes the purpose of each option right there in the menu, and those descriptions are accurate.
The general shape:
If you do not see a picker, that is fine too. You will be on the everyday option, and it handles everything in the next section.
Ten minutes. Nothing sensitive. Do it before you read the rest of the page.
It takes about a minute and it gives you the microphone button, which you will want in a moment.
It usually says something like "ask anything."
Why their books do not match their bank balance. Why filing an extension does not extend the payment. What you actually need from them before you can close the month.
Something like:
It will be close but not right. Tell it so, the way you would tell a person:
That second answer is the one that matters. What you just did is the entire skill, and there is no second thing to learn.
The reason this particular task works as a first try is that you already know the right answer. You can judge what it gave you immediately, instead of sitting there wondering whether to trust it.
What follows is not the definitive set of prompts you will use day to day. These are starting points - a sense of the kinds of work this is good at, meant to get you moving. Within a week you will be writing better ones for your own firm, because you know your firm and we do not.
The rule from earlier applies to all of them. No client names, no Social Security numbers, no account numbers.
Click any of the six below to see the prompts for it. Start with whichever is closest to the work you are doing.
This is where nearly everyone gets their first real win, because writing is the thing these tools do best and because you can judge the output instantly.
This one is underrated and takes ten seconds.
Notice the last line of this one - asking it to interview you before it starts is a small trick that changes the quality of everything you get back, and it works on almost any request.
Most firms this size run on knowledge that exists in exactly one person's head. You know how the month-end review goes. You know which clients need a second look and why. None of it is written down, and writing it down has been on your list for six years because it is genuinely tedious.
This is the single best use of the microphone button on this page.
Talk for four minutes. You will get back something that would have taken you an afternoon, and the questions it asks you will find the gaps you did not know were there.
This works for anything you have never written down. Your onboarding process. What you check before a return goes out. What you want someone to do when a client calls upset.
Two steps, and keeping them separate is the whole trick. Most firms skip the first one and go straight to writing posts, which is why so much accounting marketing sounds identical.
Argue with it here. This is the part that matters, and it is worth ten minutes.
Sometimes what you need is not a document. You need to think out loud with somebody, and running a firm can be a solitary job.
You are deciding whether to raise prices across the board. Whether it is finally time to hire. Whether to let go of a client who takes up more room than they are worth. These are the decisions that sit in the back of your mind for months.
That last line is the important one. Left alone, these tools tend to tell you your idea is a good idea. Ask it to disagree with you and it will, usefully.
By now you may be wondering about the real work. The close. The reconciliations. The returns. The categorizing that eats your Thursdays.
There is no prompt for those here, and it is not because the technology cannot do them.
It is because doing them means handing over real client data, and the public tools are not where that belongs. That is the rule from earlier, and this is the place where it actually costs you something.
Here is the honest picture. Tools built specifically for firms, with the security and confidentiality handled properly, are arriving now. Some of them are already good. Over the next few years, a real share of the repetitive work in a firm like yours is going to be done differently, and it will be done inside software built for that purpose rather than in a chat window.
Which is worth knowing about, and worth watching. But it is a different decision than the one this page is about, and it is not the place to start.
Once you are feeling comfortable with the tool and you have been using it for a while, there are some ways to become more efficient every day.
At some point, once you have used it for a handful of things, you will notice you keep saying the same stuff at the beginning of every conversation. Who your firm is. How you like letters to sound. The five things you always send a new client. Retyping all of that every time gets old fast, and that annoyance is the signal that you are ready for this.
Both tools let you set up a saved space that already knows all of it. Claude calls them Projects. ChatGPT calls them custom GPTs. Same idea.
Here is the part people assume is complicated, and it is not. You set one of these up by talking to it. Exactly the same way you have been talking to it all along. There is no new screen to learn and nothing technical to configure. You create the space and then you tell it what it needs to know:
That is the setup. That is all of it.
What changes is what happens next time. Instead of starting a blank conversation and explaining everything again, you open that space and say:
Two sentences in, a finished email out, and it sounds like you every time because you already explained how you sound.
The click-by-click setup changes from time to time, so rather than showing you screenshots that will be out of date, here are the instructions straight from each of them:
Two things to know, and then one rule.
Confidence tells you nothing. It sounds exactly as certain when it is right as when it is wrong. There is no wobble in the voice, no hedge, no tell. This trips up smart people constantly, because in every other part of life confidence carries some information. Here it carries none.
Be careful with anything it cites. These tools draw on an enormous amount of material from across the internet, and not all of that material is accurate, current, or the whole story. So any time it gives you a source - a code section, a ruling, a study, a number - go look at that source yourself and satisfy yourself it says what you were told it says. KPMG published a report last year where a large share of the citations did not hold up under checking and they had to pull it, which is a useful reminder that this catches everyone.
And then the rule, which you already follow with everything else in your firm: what goes out under your name is yours. This is a very capable assistant. It is not a second signature.
If you want the formal material on professional obligations around AI, the IRS issued guidance for tax practitioners in June 2026 covering due diligence, competence, and confidentiality.
Two things worth saying plainly, since most of what gets written about this is either breathless or apocalyptic.
These tools get noticeably better every few weeks. That is an unusual thing to be true of software, and it has a practical consequence: something that did not work when you tried it six months ago is worth trying again. The list of things it handles well keeps growing. You do not need to follow it closely, but it is worth checking back.
We do not think this replaces the people in your firm. We think it takes the repetitive, low-judgment work off their desks - the retyping, the reformatting, the fourth draft of the same email - so their time goes to the things that actually grow a firm. Talking to clients. Catching the thing that looks wrong. Training the person behind them.
That is not a comforting thing we are saying to be nice. It is what we actually believe, and it is why we are spending our own time on this.
We are Matt Beal and Matt Liptak.
We spent close to a decade working side by side at Storable, the clear leader in self-storage technology. Beal led growth, client-experience, and product teams. Liptak led operations, data, and account management. Storable was really several businesses at once, and our job was to move between them, learn how each one made money, and make it perform. We got good at stepping into an unfamiliar business, understanding it quickly, and improving it. After a decade of doing that for other people, we are ready to run a business of our own.
We are coming into this industry, we are working with operators in it, and we wanted to share some of what we have learned along with a few resources we think are genuinely useful for a firm like yours.
We are looking to buy an accounting services firm focused on bookkeeping, here in the Austin area. We will run it ourselves, not as absentee owners, with both of us in the business every day looking after your clients and your team. We are not private equity and we are not a broker.
We plan to pay competitive market value. We are buying to grow a firm, not to cut one. And your timeline governs, not ours - if the right answer is eighteen months from now, we would rather know each other for eighteen months than push.
If you own a practice and have started thinking about what comes next, we would like to talk, even if now isn't the right time. Nothing you tell us goes anywhere.
