As accountants are being asked to do more with less, thoughtfully tapping AI and automation can help to provide crucial bandwidth for the team as they become strategic leaders, said Erik Zhou, chief accounting officer and SVP of finance and accounting for Brex. The San Francisco, California-based fintech startup offers AI-powered financial tools, including corporate credit cards and spend management.

“Folks in the finance function are being asked to not just look at the past…and not just create the report and the numbers and, what's changing the numbers year over year, month over month,” Zhou said in an interview. “They're being asked to assess, ‘Why did numbers change this way?’”

Hitting the right balance  

Bringing in automation has long been a part of the strategy for finance leaders looking to take some of the pressures off overworked and understaffed accounting teams — especially as an ongoing accounting talent shortage winnows down the pool of qualified graduates.

“What's tough to balance is that there are fewer trained accountants in the workforce,” a shortage which also means their services are more expensive, Zhou said. “And at the same time, there's this body of work that's continuously growing larger because, companies get larger.”

The focus on the accounting talent gap has only sharpened in the generative AI age, when more and more companies are examining how tools such as “AI agents” can be utilized to improve the efficiency of certain processes — potentially to the detriment of certain finance jobs, CFO Dive previously reported.

However, there needs to be a balance between the speed and scale of AI tools and the learned experience and judgment of accounting employees. As a CAO, “my number one job is to make sure when I produce the reporting for all my stakeholders, that it's reliable and credible and complete and accurate, because those are the numbers that then go into other analyses throughout the whole company so that we can make the best strategic decisions for the company itself,” Zhou said.

As such, when looking to make Brex’s own accounting team more efficient, the goal is “to continuously automate more and more of those processes so that the team can focus more on the analytics of the numbers, and make sure everything makes sense, so that we can generate a more thoughtful report, so to speak, for our stakeholders,” he said.

An alum of Big Four accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers — where he logged an 11-year tenure — Zhou joined the fintech company in 2018 as its CAO, according to his LinkedIn profile. At the time of his joining, Zhou and Brex’s controller, Kevin Moore, represented the only two accountants at the business, he said.

Over time, both the accounting team’s size and remit expanded, with the team now covering everything from controllership to technical accounting, financial reporting and tax, among other areas, Zhou said.

Making the judgment call  

As the accounting team becomes a more strategic player in the business, with their responsibilities growing accordingly, adding in automation for certain critical processes and tasks will swiftly become table stakes.

“It's definitely something that at scale, I think you have to do in order to get the maximum value that you want to achieve from your accounting function, and many functions, frankly,” Zhou said of bringing in automation.

Keeping that value in mind is key when determining where to integrate such tools: “you automate what you can even within a process, and you'll have exceptions,” he said. “You have to have a dynamic enough workforce, an idea of what your function should look like, in order to live with that.”

There are certain areas that still require an accountant’s judgment, Zhou said, such as complex arenas like taxes. Standards such as U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, for instances, are “a living, breathing set of rules” that require discernment from a skilled accountant in order to ensure the business is properly applying them.

“The tricky things about tax from my estimation are judgments you have to make year-over-year,” Zhou said. “So there's choices that you can make within the range of tax law.”