Can an agent do accounting?
Half. An agent handles the ledger — categorising, reconciling, chasing receipts, drafting the month-end pack. It cannot sign off on your accounts, take a position on a grey tax treatment, or carry the liability when a regulator disagrees.
- Hours back per week
- 9
- Human cost
- €2,000–4,500/mo for a part-time accountant or bookkeeping firm
- Agent cost
- €40–120/mo in tokens and tool calls
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Categorise transactions
YESReads the bank feed, applies your chart of accounts, learns your merchant quirks after about two weeks.
Reconcile bank and ledger
YESMatches lines, flags the handful that will not match, and explains why each one broke.
Chase missing receipts
YESFinds the unsupported spend, emails the person who made it, follows up until the file lands.
Accruals, prepayments, deferred revenue
MOSTLYComputes them correctly from contracts and invoices. You confirm the revenue policy once, not monthly.
Month-end close pack
MOSTLYDrafts P&L, balance sheet, cash flow and a written variance commentary. You review before it goes anywhere.
- Yours
Grey-area tax treatment
NOT YETIt will give you an answer with a confidence it has not earned. This is where a human accountant is worth the fee.
- Yours
Signing and filing statutory accounts
NOT YETA licensed human has to put their name on it. That is a legal fact, not a capability gap.
3/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Signing the accounts and owning the liability
- Judgement calls where the treatment is arguable
- The conversation with your tax authority
- Deciding what the numbers mean for the business
How this goes wrong
People let an agent categorise for six months without ever reading the exceptions log. The ledger looks immaculate and the VAT position is quietly wrong, which you find out at year end when it is expensive to unwind.
What it needs access to
- Xero or QuickBooks
- Bank feed
- Stripe
- Gmail or Outlook
- Google Drive or Dropbox
- Slack
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my bookkeeping agent. Every weekday, pull new transactions from my bank feed and Stripe, categorise them against my chart of accounts in Xero, and reconcile against the ledger. Anything you are less than 90% sure about goes in an exceptions list — do not guess. Chase missing receipts by email, following up twice, then escalating to me. On the first working day of each month, draft a close pack: P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and a short written commentary on anything that moved more than 15% versus last month. Never file anything. Never contact my accountant or a tax authority. Show me the exceptions list before the pack.
Questions people ask
Can an AI agent replace my accountant?
No, but it can replace most of what you pay your accountant to do. The compliance work — categorising, reconciling, preparing — is the bulk of the hours and the part an agent handles well. What remains is advice, judgement and signature, which is a much smaller and much more valuable engagement.
Is it safe to give an agent access to my accounting system?
Give it read access everywhere and write access only to the ledger, never to payments. An agent that can categorise a transaction cannot move money. Keep those two permissions separate and the worst case is a mis-coded expense rather than a lost balance.
How accurate is agent bookkeeping?
On clean bank feeds with a stable chart of accounts, categorisation lands around 95% correct out of the box and higher once it has seen a couple of months of your corrections. The number that matters is not accuracy, it is whether the 5% shows up in an exceptions list instead of silently in your books.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Xero or QuickBooks and Bank feed, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up an accounting agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.