Accounting
Sage Copilot AI aims to pair power and simplicity for small and medium businesses
Published
7 months agoon

Small and mid-size business platform Sage is already well experienced with AI, having woven it throughout their products for years, but its new generative AI Sage Copilot solution has been touted as a dramatic step forward in the company’s long term vision of simplifying accounting to make it more accessible to all.
Aaron Harris, Sage’s chief technology officer, said that the company has long had classic AI deep learning models that perform functions users have relied on for years. These tasks often require the use of many different models working in concert, with Harris noting that invoice processing alone requires the use of 27 different models: 15 to 20 are required to read the data alone, and more are needed to perform the calculations.
Sage Copilot coordinates between these models and acts as an interpreter between them and the human users who are requesting they perform a task. Effectively a “mouth” attached to a larger whole, the LLM works by translating the user request, usually inputted through a conversational interface, into machine language. This then goes to the various AI models on Sage’s servers, which then get to work on whatever the user asked them for, eventually sending instructions back to the LLM. The LLM reads back the machine language and implements the command or, in the case of an informational query, translates it back to human language. Harris stressed that it is not the LLM itself that does this work, referencing their well-known difficulties with math, but the other AI models that the LLM interacts with.
“We don’t trust them to do math. There’s much better ways to do math… We’re not using the AI to do the math on the results, we’re using AI to write the [
He added that, rather than being a feature of any one particular solution, Sage Copilot can be used across its products through the use of specialized “agents.” The company creates AI “agents” purpose built to do one thing really well, such as interacting with certain types of data, executing specific queries, or engaging with specific software products. Sage Copilot has access to multiple agents, each built to communicate with a different product, whether Sage Intaact, Sage HR or something else.
“The intention is that Copilot can work across the portfolio of Sage products,” he said.
Having Copilot act as a coordinator for all the other models also means its automation capacities go far past what it had previously accomplished. Harris raised the example of processing an invoice. This act alone requires multiple steps, but many of them have already been automated in Sage, taking out much of the work. Copilot goes a step further by allowing wholesale workflow automation through coordinating among several models that each enable a different automated process. “We can now really accelerate our ability to automate with large language models, and we can use AI to do more of the orchestration. So, giving it the ability to not just process the invoice but to move it on to the approval stage, to understand after it’s approved [it needs to] move it through the payment process,” he said.
He added that, in the future, “that invoice will have been created for you, automatically.” His team had recently conducted a hackathon where it was found Copilot can automatically generate invoices based on events happening around the user, like if it knew they were going on a job using geofencing, and act proactively.
Harris said that certain companies today will attach their solution to a ChatGPT account and call that generative AI functionality. In contrast, developing Copilot was a meticulous process that required a lot of trial and error even before its UK release earlier this year. During this time, the development team encountered many challenges that needed to be overcome, such as teaching the model that there can be more than one kind of cash balance.
“I got in and I asked Copilot ‘what is my cash balance?’ And Copilot said it’s at zero. And I dug around and what I learned was that Copilot inferred from my question ‘what’s my petty cash?’ It didn’t actually understand that what I was asking for was the balance of cash across my bank account,” he said. “Fast forward a month. We’ve done a lot of work to train the model the way we wanted to when you ask that question. … [Now] it’ll give you a table with your bank accounts and your balances in total. If that is what you’re asking, this is the answer.”
Getting these kinds of interactions right was vital to ensuring Copilot was easy to use and reliable in its outputs without having to possess a lot of arcane technical knowledge. Interacting with Copilot in plain language allows people to access accounting information and perform business tasks on their own, a major component of the wider goal of making accounting more accessible to a wider base of people.
“Generative AI and copilots, and their natural conversational interface, enables us to bring accounting outside the finance team to the rest of the business. One of the biggest blocks is getting [accountants] to approve things or to answer questions, finance teams are spending time supporting me instead of getting the books closed. With Copilot having a conversational interface, it now becomes much more natural and easy for me to approve a purchase order or to ask a question like ‘how am I trending on my travel expenses?'” Harris said.
While Sage wants to make accounting more accessible to the layperson, he added that professionals can be excited too. The big promise, he said, is that it will free them from things they don’t want to do. He compared it to having an army of interns at one’s disposal who can take care of the numerous mundane demands that pop up throughout the day. The result, according to Harris, will be “faster and smarter decisions.”
“Unpacking that, what we’re really saying is [this can be] how you, across the whole of the business, understand the patterns of activity in that business in real time to discover when there is a change in performance—when there’s something that can indicate an opportunity or risk—that the more strategic specialists can address in real time… We’re enabling more decisions to be made confidently,” he said.
Harris said the name “Copilot” represents what he felt was a good bet that the term copilot would become generic, versus being permanently associated with Microsoft’s product. He said that the term has, over time, emerged as standard in a similar manner as “band-aid,” “Xerox” and “Google.”
The large language model was released in the UK in February and is set for release in the US at the end of this year.
Part of a larger strategy
Copilot is one component of the company’s larger product strategy to promote continuous accounting, real time assurance and continuous insights. But this, itself, is part of Sage’s overall strategy, particularly for the North American market; Mark Hickman, the managing director of North America, said Copilot is “critical to our success.”
“As we move forward, [we want] to really be that leader, we want to be ahead of the competition when it comes to AI and how we bring that to market, into that ecosystem of 2 million customers globally and hundreds and hundreds of thousands in North America,” said Hickman.
To this end, Sage has been busy making new alliances and deepening current ones with companies like Microsoft, Amazon and PwC. They have collaborated on technology solutions with the aim of eventually driving integration into products like Office and other platforms, as well as on distribution and implementation of said solutions. With Microsoft and Amazon in particular, Hickman said they have whole partnerships where they go to market together and close new customers. Given these companies’ focus on large enterprises, Sage’s focus on small and medium businesses has acted as a bridge to this larger community.
“What we’ve discovered here is that [Microsoft and Amazon], they don’t really play in the small to medium businesses with the cloud. So 90% of their new customers are net new customers so they’re actually getting into new customers because they’re working with us and closing new deals to get into these accounts and … using their amazing, world class platforms and their brands to work together,” he said.
This is especially germane as the UK-based Sage expands further into the North American market, which makes up more than 44% of the company’s global revenues already. The company is making heavy investments in this region, which include technology but also additional staff as well as new facilities. Hickman said they will be building a whole new campus in Atlanta to serve as their new base for North American operations (in addition to the office they already maintain in that city), as well as new offices in Portland and Vancouver.
Hickman said Sage’s thinking on these new locations came as the company emerged from the pandemic lockdowns, eventually settling on what he called a “hub strategy.” Previously, the company had over 80 offices around the world, but he said many of them were small and remote. The company chose a very deliberate strategy where they would instead have large offices in each of the major markets they really invest in, with fewer small satellite offices. This has allowed them to really focus their efforts around these flagship country “hubs.” He noted that the new offices in Canada is also a reflection of this hub strategy of “really increasing the investment in the offices where we want to concentrate our growth.”
“So the North American businesses, the US businesses, are the fastest growing [sector] with great growth, and we hope to really accelerate that growth as we move forward,” he added.
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Accounting
Accountants tackle tariff increases after ‘Liberation Day’
Published
1 hour agoon
April 3, 2025
President Trump’s imposition of steep tariffs on countries around the world is likely to drive demand for accounting experts and consultants to help companies adjust and forecast the ever-changing percentages and terms.
On April 2, which Trump dubbed “Liberation Day,” he announced a raft of reciprocal tariffs of varying percentages on trading partners across the globe and signed an
“A lot of CFOs are thinking they are going to pass along the tariffs to their customer base, and about another half are thinking we’re going to absorb it and be more creative in other ways we can save money inside our company,” said Tom Hood, executive vice president for business engagement and growth at the AICPA & CIMA.
The AICPA & CIMA’s most recent
“CFOs in our community are telling us that, effectively, they’re looking at this a lot like what happened over COVID with a big disruption out of nowhere,” said Hood. “This one, they could see it coming. But the point is they had to immediately pivot into forecasting and projection with basically forward-looking financial analysis to help their companies, CEOs, etc., plan for what could be coming next. This is true for firms who are advising clients. They might be hired to do the planning in an outsourced way, if the company doesn’t have the finance talent inside to do that.”
The tariffs are not set in stone, and other countries are likely to continue to negotiate them with the U.S., as Canada and Mexico have been doing in recent months.
“The one thing that I think we can all count on is a certain amount of uncertainty in this process, at least for the next several months,” said Charles Clevenger, a principal at UHY Consulting who specializes in supply chain and procurement strategy. “It’s hard to tell if it’s going to go beyond that or not, but it certainly feels that way.”
Accountants will need to make sure their companies and clients stay compliant with whatever conditions are imposed by the U.S. and its trading partners. “This is a more complex tariff environment than most companies have experienced in the past, or that seems to be where we’re headed, and so ensuring compliance is really important,” said Clevenger.
Big Four firms are advising caution among their clients.
“Our point of view is we’re advising all of our clients to do a few things right out of the gate,” said Martin Fiore, EY Americas deputy vice chair of tax, during a webinar Thursday. “Model and analyze the trade flows. Look at your supply chain structures. Understand those and execute scenario planning on supply chain structures that could evolve in new environments. That is really important: the ability for companies to address the questions they’re getting from their C-suite, from their stakeholders, is critical. Every company is in a different spot according to the discussions we’ve had. We just are really emphasizing, with all the uncertainty, know your structure, know your position, have modeling put in place, so as we go through the next rounds of discussions over many months, you have an understanding of your structure.”
Scenario planning will be especially important amid all the unpredictability for companies large and small. “They’re going to be looking at all the different countries they might have supply chains in,” said Hood. “And then even the smaller midsized companies that might not be big, giant global companies, they might be supplying things to a big global company, and if they’re in part of that supply chain, they’ll be impacted through this whole cycle as well.”
Accountants will have to factor the extra tariffs and import taxes into their costs and help their clients decide whether to pass on the costs to customers, while also keeping an eye out for pricing among their competitors and suppliers.
“It’s just like accounting for any goods that you’re purchasing,” said Hood. “They often have tariffs and taxes built into them at different levels. I think the difference is these could be bigger and they could be more uncertain, because we’re not even sure they’re going to stick until you see the response by the other countries and the way this is absorbed through the market. I think we’re going through this period of deeper uncertainty. Even though they’re announced, we know that the administration has a tendency to negotiate, so I’m sure we’re going to see this thing evolve, probably in the next 30 days or whatever. The other thing our CFOs are reminding us of is that the stock market is not the economy.”
Amid the market fluctuations, companies and their accountants will need to watch closely as the rules and tariff rates fluctuate and ensure they are complying with the trading rules. “Do we have country of origin specified properly?” said Clevenger. “Are we completing the right paperwork? When there are questions, are we being responsive? Are we close to our broker? Are we monitoring our customs entries and all the basic things that we need to do? That’s more important now than it has been in the past because of this increase in complexity.”
Accounting
How to use opportunity zone tax credits in the ‘Heartland’
Published
2 hours agoon
April 3, 2025
A tax credit for investments in low-income areas could spur long-term job creation in overlooked parts of the country — with the right changes to its rules, according to a new book.
The capital gains deferral and exclusions available through the “opportunity zones” credit represent one of the few areas of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that drew support from both Republicans and Democrats. The impact of the credit, though, has proven murky in terms of boosting jobs and economic growth in the roughly 7,800 Census tracts qualifying based on their rates of poverty or median family incomes.
Altering the criteria to focus the investments on “less traditional real estate and more innovation infrastructure” and ensuring they reach more places outside of New York and California could “refine the where and the what” of the credit, said Nicholas Lalla, the author of “
“I don’t want to sound naive. I know that investors leveraging opportunity zones want to make money and reduce their tax liability, but I would encourage them to do a few additional things,” Lalla said. “There are communities that need investment, that need regional and national partners to support them, and their participation can pay dividends.”
READ MORE:
A call to action
In the book, Lalla writes about how the Innovation Labs received $200 million in fundraising through public and private investments for projects like a startup unmanned aerial vehicle testing site in the Osage Nation called the Skyway36 Droneport and Technology Innovation Center. Such collaborations carry special relevance in an area like Tulsa, Oklahoma, which has a history marked by the wealth ramifications of the
“This book is a call to action for the United States to address one of society’s defining challenges: expanding opportunity by harnessing the tech industry and ensuring gains spread across demographics and geographies,” he writes. “The middle matters, the center must hold, and Heartland cities need to reinvent themselves to thrive in the innovation age. That enormous project starts at the local level, through place-based economic development, which can make an impact far faster than changing the patterns of financial markets or corporate behavior. And inclusive growth in tech must start with the reinvention of Heartland cities. That requires cities — civic ecosystems, not merely municipal governments — to undertake two changes in parallel. The first is transitioning their legacy economies to tech-based ones, and the second is shifting from a growth mindset to an inclusive-growth mindset. To accomplish both admittedly ambitious endeavors, cities must challenge local economic development orthodoxy and readjust their entire civic ecosystems for this generational project.”
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Researching the shortcomings
And that’s where an “opportunity zones 2.0” program could play an important role in supporting local tech startups, turning midsized cities into innovation engines and collaborating with philanthropic organizations or the federal, state and local governments, according to Lalla.
In
Other research suggested that opportunity-zone investments in metropolitan areas generated a 3% to 4.5% jump in employment, compared to a flat rate in rural places,
“It creates a strong incentive for taxpayers to make investments that will appreciate greatly in market value,” Tax Foundation President Emeritus Scott Hodge wrote in the analysis, “Opportunity Zones ‘Make a Good Return Greater,’ but Not for Poor Residents” shortly after the Treasury study.
“This may be the fatal flaw in opportunity zones,” he wrote. “It explains why most of the investments have been in real estate — which tends to appreciate faster than other investments — and in Census tracts that were already improving before being designated as opportunity zones.”
So far, three other research studies have concluded that the investments made little to no impact on commercial development, no clear marks on housing prices, employment and business formation and a notable boost in multifamily and other residential property,
The credit “deviates a lot from previous policies” that were much more prescriptive, Feldman said.
“It didn’t want the government to have a lot of oversay over what was going on, where the investment was going, the type of investments and things like that,” she said. “It offered uncapped tax incentives for private individual investors to invest unrealized capital gains. So this was the big innovation of OZs. It was taking the stock of unrealized capital gains that wealthy individuals, or even less wealthy individuals, had sitting, and they could roll it over into these funds that could then be invested in these opportunity zones. And there were a lot of tax breaks that came with that.”
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A ‘place-based’ strategy
The shifts that Lalla is calling for in the policy “could either be narrowing criteria for what qualifies as an opportunity zone or creating force multipliers that further incentivize investments in more places,” he said. In other words, investors may consider ideas for, say, semiconductor plants, workforce training facilities or data centers across the Midwest and in rural areas throughout the country rather than trying to build more luxury residential properties in New York and Los Angeles.
While President Donald Trump has certainly favored that type of economic development over his career in real estate, entertainment and politics, those properties could tap into other tax incentives. And a refreshed approach to opportunity zones could speak to the “real innovation and talent potential in midsized cities throughout the Heartland,” enabling a policy that experts like Lalla describe as “place-based,” he said. With any policies that mention the words “
“We can’t have cities across the country isolated from tech and innovation,” he said. “When you take a geographic lens to economic inclusion, to economic mobility, to economic prosperity, you are including communities like Tulsa, Oklahoma. You’re including communities throughout Appalachia, throughout the Midwest that have been isolated over the past 20 years.”
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Hope for the future?
In the book, Lalla compares the similar goals of opportunity zones to those of earlier policies under President Joe Biden’s administration like the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“Together, these bills provided hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money for a more diverse group of cities and regions to invest in innovation infrastructure and ecosystems,” Lalla writes. “Although it will take years for these investments to bear fruit, they mark an encouraging change in federal economic development policy. I am cautiously optimistic that the incoming Trump administration will continue this trend, which has disproportionately helped the Heartland. For example, Trump’s opportunity zone program in his first term, which offered tax incentives to invest in distressed parts of the country, should be adapted and scaled to support innovation ecosystems in the Heartland. For the first time in generations, the government is taking a place-based approach to economic development, intentionally seeking to fund projects in communities historically disconnected from the nation’s innovation system and in essential industries. They’re doing so through a decidedly regional approach.”
Advisors and
“This really is a bipartisan issue. Opportunity zones won wide bipartisan approval,” he said. “Heartland cities can flourish and can do so in a complicated political environment.”
Accounting
Ramp releases tool to detect fraudulent AI-generated receipts
Published
2 hours agoon
April 3, 2025
Dave Wieseneck, an “expert in residence” at Ramp who administers the company’s own instance of Ramp, noted that faking receipts is not a new practice. What’s changed is that, with the recent
“So while it’s always been possible to create fake receipts, AI has made it super duper easy, especially OpenAI with their latest model. So I think it’s just super easy now and anybody can do it, as opposed to experts that are in the know,” he said in an interview.

Rather than try to assess the image itself, the software looks at the file’s
“When we see that these markers are present, we have really high confidence of high accuracy to identify them as potentially AI generated receipts,” said Wieseneck. “I was the first person to test it out as the person that owns our internal instance of Ramp and
While the speed at which they produced this solution may be remarkable, he said it is part of the company culture. The team, especially small pods within it, will observe a problem and stop what they’re doing to focus on a specific need. They get a group together on a Slack channel, work through the problem, code it late at night and push it out in the morning.
Wieseneck conceded it is not a total solution but rather a first line of defense to deter the casual fraudster. He compared it to locking your door before going out. If the front door is unlocked, a person can just stroll in and steal everything, but will likely give up if it is locked. A professional criminal with tons of breaking and entering experience, however, is unlikely to be deterred by a lock alone, versus a lock plus an alarm system plus an actual security guard.
“But that doesn’t mean that you don’t lock your door and you don’t add pieces of defense to make it harder for people to either rob your house or, in this case, defraud your company,” he said.
This isn’t to say there’s no plans to bolster this solution further. After all, the feature is only days old. He said the company is already looking into things like pixel analysis and textual analysis of the document itself to further enhance its AI detection capabilities, though he stressed that they want to be very confident it works before pushing it out to customers.
“We’re focused on giving finance teams confidence that legitimate receipts won’t be falsely flagged. So we want to tread carefully. We have lots of ideas. We’re going to work through them and kind of solve them in the same process we’ve always done here at Ramp,” he said.
This is likely only the beginning of AI image generators being used to fake documentation. For instance, it has recently been found that bots are also very good at forging
AI fraud ascendant
This speaks to an overall trend of AI being used in financial crimes which was highlighted in a
The poll found that 61% of respondents say use of AI by cybercriminals is a leading catalyst for risk exposure, such as through the generation of deep fakes and, likely, AI-generated financial documents. While 57% think AI will help against financial crime, 49% think it will hinder (Kroll said they are likely both right).
“The rapid-fire adoption of AI tools can be a blessing and a curse when it comes to financial crime, providing new and more efficient ways to combat it while also creating new techniques to exploit the broadening attack surface — be it via AI-powered phishing attacks, deepfakes, or real-time mimicry of expected security configurations,” said the report.
Yet, many professionals do not feel their current programs are up to the task. The rise in AI-guided fraud is part of an overall projected 71% increase in financial crime risks in 2025. Meanwhile, only 23% rate their compliance programs as “very effective” with lack of technology and investment named as prime reasons. Many also lack confidence in the governance infrastructure overseeing financial crime, with just 29% describing it as “robust.”
They’re also not entirely convinced that more AI is the solution. The poll found that confidence in AI technology has dropped dramatically over the past two years: those who say AI tools have had a positive impact on financial crime compliance have gone from 39% in 2023 to only 20% today. Despite this, there remains heavy investment in AI. The poll found 25% already say AI is an established part of their financial crime compliance program, and 30% say they are in the early stages of adoption. Meanwhile, in the year ahead, 49% expect their organization will invest in AI solutions to tackle financial crime, and 47% say the same about their cybersecurity budgets.
To help combat AI-enabled financial crime, Kroll recommended companies form cross-functional teams that go beyond IT and cybersecurity and involve those in AML, compliance, legal, product and senior management. Further, Kroll said there has to be focused, hands-on training with new AI tools that are updated and repeated as the organization implements new AI capabilities and the regulatory and risk landscape changes. Finally, to combat AI-related fraud, Kroll recommended companies maintain a “back to the basics” approach. Focus on fundamental human intervention and confirmation procedures — regardless of how convincing or time-sensitive circumstances appear.

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