A CPA Firm Recovers 15–20 Hours a Week and Stops Losing Senior Staff to Burnout
The Problem
A 10-person accounting firm in Farmington Hills was at a breaking point. Their senior CPAs were spending close to 60% of their billable day manually reconciling mismatched ERP data between client systems and the firm's own ledger. The work was unglamorous, repetitive, and entirely unsuited for the people doing it. Two senior staff had flagged burnout in their last reviews. Client advisory capacity had stalled because the people who should be doing advisory work were buried in reconciliation.
The Solution
We started with the AI Readiness Audit to confirm the reconciliation bottleneck was the right first target — it was. We then deployed a single reconciliation agent: a workflow that reads the mismatched data from both systems, applies the firm's reconciliation logic, flags exceptions above a defined confidence threshold for human review, and syncs the resolved entries automatically. No new software platform. Built on top of the tools they already had.
- Automated ERP-to-ledger reconciliation agent
- Confidence-scored exception routing for human review
- Direct sync to existing accounting platform
- 4-week build sprint including team training and documentation
The Results
Before
~60% of billable day
After
< 20% of billable day
Before
0
After
15–20 hrs
Before
Stalled
After
Growing
Before
Elevated
After
Stabilized
"We didn't hire AI to replace our accountants. We hired it to give them their jobs back. Within a quarter, the people who were thinking about leaving were talking about growth."