Artificial intelligence-based automation is lowering the curtain on the accounting profession’s long and fruitful spreadsheet era — just as the spreadsheet ended the era of hand-calculated ledgers.

This time is different, though. The fundamental labor of tax and audit has forever changed. AI can, in a flash, accomplish what litanies of VLOOKUPs, pivot tables, conditional formulas and various other spreadsheet techniques take hours to do. By altering the basic currency of accounting work, AI has changed the skill sets and personal characteristics tied to success in the accounting profession. That, in turn, has changed this field’s recruiting game — and, more broadly, the talent- and resource-management games. 

AI’s role in recruiting grows by the day, and along two main fronts. The first is boosting HR efficiency by reducing the cost, effort and time required to recruit through the sourcing, screening and evaluation processes. The second is increasing the quality and fit of incoming team members through better accuracy and conversion rates in hiring.

AI is revolutionizing recruiting in tax and audit

A dizzying number of AI-infused solutions exist along both fronts. These include standalone systems as well as recruiting-specific modules offered by major ERP vendors. In addition, ERPs are increasingly exploiting cloud integration to enable the smooth incorporation of what once would have been standalone systems. SAP alone has more than 100 such partners, including Apli, HireEZ, Impress.ai, JobAI-lysis, Magneto, Paradox, Pulsifi, SeekOut, SniperAI and TurboHire, to name just a few.

Some focus narrowly; some cover lots of territory. AI helps screen resumes. Old-school applicant-tracking systems have been doing that for years, but AI is enabling far more precision, to the benefit of companies and candidates alike. More impressively, AI conducts automated, conversational interactions (via web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email and more) to assess both hard skills (yes, Excel still counts) and soft skills such as emotional intelligence, leadership traits, reliability, customer orientation and teamwork. All that feeds into better candidate profiles while saving HR staff a ton of time.

AI enables tailoring of hiring criteria based on past successful hires. It can run psychometric tests and rank candidates on dozens of variables. It can tap into talent pools through public profiles, professional-service organizations, job boards, university databases and other sources, locally and globally. It can scour for passive candidates and predict candidate interest and availability. AI can determine a prospect’s market value, then use predictive hiring analytics to estimate the likelihood of offer acceptance. It can conduct video interviews and assess communication style and tone, verbal and nonverbal cues, and the consistency of responses, then transcribe and summarize the results.

AI in service delivery changes what accounting firms are recruiting for

AI’s ability to help recruiters tease out soft skills and personal qualities is particularly important to today’s accounting profession. The managing partner of a Big Four firm once joked that an extroverted accountant was one who, while conversing, looked at your shoes instead of his own. That won’t cut it anymore. This field needs people with interpersonal skills and an ability to understand the business significance of the data AI has already spreadsheet-jockeyed. They must compellingly present and explain their conclusions to others in the organization. Much earlier in their careers, accountants must now be able to assess the state of the race rather than just spur on a single horse. 

That has implications far beyond AI in recruiting. Where we’re headed is the AI-facilitated integration of recruiting, resource management and talent management to help spreadsheet sophisticates learn the bigger-picture business and build and refine their strategic-thinking and interpersonal skills — and at the same time provide a new generation of accountants hired on evolved criteria with the deeper audit-and-tax skills they must harness for the firm’s and their own success.

AI-powered resource management has become a major focus

Given the need to bring in strong performers in a specialized field in which retirements are outpacing new entrants, accounting firms are moving on all three fronts. Notably, they’re turning to ERP-integrated AI resource-management and talent-management systems such as ProFinda and Whoz. These take into account skills, rates, availability, capacity and other factors to determine the optimal mix of internal and external workforces, including a growing number of gig-work and contract accountants. Central to these systems are staff retention and reskilling, both which go hand in hand with the new recruiting paradigm. 

The sunset of the spreadsheet era has profound implications for accounting firms. AI-powered recruiting solutions are now indispensable in finding, assessing and bringing in talent poised to thrive in reshaped tax and audit ecosystems. But AI recruiting is not enough. It’s going to take combinations of integrated AI systems to ensure staff can grow quickly into more strategic roles even as firms profitably maintain high levels of client service. It takes a village to raise a child, the saying goes. These days, it takes an AI village to develop an accountant.

Business management solutions provider Zoho announced that its customer relationship manager, previously only for sales teams, has been modified and enhanced with AI to become, now, the CRM for Everyone solution. This is because, according to Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist with Zoho, more people deal with customers than just the sales team. 

“Before, CRM was relegated to salespeople, but a lot of folks deal with the customer, so how do you get access to CRM for all these groups? This is where CRM for everyone comes in. Your legal team, market team, service team, can now access the CRM,” he said. 

However, it is not very useful for, say, the legal team to only be able to interact with the system in the context of sales. This in mind, the redesigned solution now sports extensive customization abilities that let users tailor the CRM to their specific needs. A big part of this is the ability to create new modules, aided by Zoho’s embedded AI Zia. 

“In this case, I am a legal person. I like what I see, but I want to create a module for managing my contracts. How do I do it? You see Zia? I can say ‘create a contracts module where I can upload contracts and link them to deals.’ Simple. Zia now analyzes the context of your business and the context of the modules you have access to, as well as other modules that it can link to, and based on that suggests what [components should belong in the module, such as vendor, contract ID, contract value, contract type, etcetera.] I can choose to create it and that creates a module. Zia makes module creation easy,” said Vegesna. 

He added it is a similar process for creating custom workflows: the user tells the AI what they want (e.g. be notified by email when a deal is closed with a value greater than $30,000), and the AI then creates the trigger events in the appropriate modules then sets up the workflow schedule itself, then acts as an agent to execute them. 

The solution also supports report creation, using the Zia AI to create it based on the user’s permissions. As they can see the AI’s build process in real time, the user also has the ability to interrupt Zia to make additional changes, then ask Zia to resume after the override. It also supports a feature called “Image to Canvas” which allows users to upload an image and have the AI incorporate it into the CRM as a design element. For example, if an HR team wants to create a list view that matches employee ID cards, it can upload an ID card image, and Zia will generate a custom Canvas view automatically.

“Multiple people in an organization need access to customer information, yet historically, CRMs have been relegated to only sales teams,” said Mani Vembu, CEO of Zoho. “As we democratize CRM with the launch of CRM for Everyone, we also need to build in capabilities that make it easy for anyone to build and extend CRM with simple prompts, without having to be an expert in the system. This is where Zia’s advanced capabilities come in. Now, anyone can create capabilities, workflows, or reports in CRM with a simple prompt. They can also make their CRM look the way they want with Zia’s image to design capabilities.”

As of today, CRM For Everyone is generally available to global businesses. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, AI capabilities are included in license costs for customers. Under CRM For Everyone, Team user (non-sales CRM users) licenses start at $9 per user per month on all paid editions of Zoho CRM.

Business management solutions provider Zoho announced the general release of a new payments solution, Zoho Payments, promised to be the first step in a broader move into financial services. 

The new Zoho Payments solution focuses specifically on incoming, not outgoing, payments. While there are already several options to accept payments from within the Zoho ecosystem, Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, Zoho’s global head of finance and operations, said what makes this product different is that it works through its own payment gateway instead of integrating with someone else’s. This gateway (basically the software needed to accept debit or credit card purchases from customers) will also be integrated with all the other solutions in the Zoho ecosystem, as well as their workflows. However, he later added that it will still support third-party integrations in case a customer wanted to use another one. 

Zoho Payments will also be available as a standalone offer, with Iswaran saying Zoho will be directly competing with incumbent payment solutions providers like Stripe and PayPal. 

“The obvious question is why are you getting into this area? Honestly, there is no one particular vendor who can actually address all the problems for [every] customer,” he said during an interview. “The market is huge. There is room for a lot of players, and each market player can find their own niche.” 

In the case of Zoho Payments, the major differentiating factor will be the amount of support happening in the background to facilitate all the major checks and balances typically needed for secure payments. Accepting payments can entail a lot more than just receiving the money and sending a receipt. Before the payment, businesses might need to consider things like identity verification, know-your-customer rules, sanctions and anti-money laundering screening, fraud and risk management; after the payment, they might need to think about transaction settlements, bank reconciliation, tax reporting and dispute resolution. 

Iswaran said this typically requires a lot of manual processes on the part of the user, which can delay the onboarding of new customers, sometimes severely so. By using its own dedicated payment portal, Zoho can do a lot of the heavy lifting without the user even noticing. While a transaction might seem simple to those sending and receiving the payment, it is supported by extensive support — both automated and manual — happening in the background.

“We do a lot of heavy lifting in the background,” said Iswaran during the product announcement. “For example, before giving a merchant account to a customer, we have to do the complete [know-your-customer] check, identity verification, [anti-money laundering] and various sanction screenings, abide by various compliance rules that are set by the card networks like Visa and by the various central banks and the banks, manage risk and fraud, a whole lot of things. … So the product definition might look simple, but underneath, the underlying product is very complex.”  

Beyond this dedicated support, he said that integrating Payments into the wider Zoho ecosystem means the solution both supports, and is supported by, other products in the suite. By working together, he said they can create a true end-to-end solution that covers every step of the process from start to finish. 

“So we will actually embed the Zoho Payments natively in all these products, into the entire ecosystem, making accepting payments very simple and easy. And we will also be supporting the various flows in which the payments can be collected. That is sending out an invoice and collecting the payment, or maybe sending out a payment link, or just collecting payment through hosted pages or subscription-related payments, or maybe just embedding a checkout form to collect payment from the e-commerce website. So we’ll be supporting all these scenarios. So with this payment launch, we actually cover the end to end of the spectrum,” he said at the product launch. 

Zoho Payments launched last year in India before becoming generally available now. Iswaran, in an interview, said that India (where Zoho is based) was a good place to start because the Central Bank of India imposes an unusually large amount of financial regulation and reporting requirements to regulate the payment industry there. The thinking was that if Zoho could build a product to satisfy regulators in India, it could be successful in many other countries as well. 

“Being a regulated business, the central bank actually asks for a lot of things,” said Iswaran. For example, it often asks companies how they’ll respond to particular scenarios that arise over the course of its work, “so that’s the kind of environment we have in involvement with the central bank in India. So that actually prepares us a lot, and that is definitely helping us with the launch this year as well,” he said. 

Iswaran said the release is just the first step in a larger push into the fintech/financial services space. 

“We have more products to follow. Zoho will have more exciting launches, so stay tuned,” he said at the end of the product launch. 

Zoho Payments helps businesses accept card payments in over 135 currencies and ACH payments for transactions within the U.S. The payment solution works out-of-the-box with Zoho’s apps from finance and operations, sales and marketing, low-code and collaboration platforms. Businesses can also connect to any third-party systems via APIs to collect payments. The solution is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant. 

Zoho Payments is now available for use. Pricing for domestic cards is 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, which includes Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, JCB, UnionPay and Diners Club. The pricing for international cards is 1.5% plus the domestic card fee.