← Back to the blog

What happens to bookkeepers now the AI can do the bookkeeping?

Matt Parrett, Chartered Tax Adviser · eTax AI · July 2026 · 8 min read

I was asked the other day what the future of bookkeeping is, now that AI is everywhere. It's a fair question and I get a version of it most weeks — usually phrased less politely.

We run a multi-million pound accountancy practice: fifty staff, three offices in the UK and one in Lahore. So people look at that and ask the obvious thing. Why have you still got that many bookkeepers? Are you going to need them?

Here's my honest answer. We are not planning to reduce our bookkeeper count. Not this year, not next. But their job is changing completely, and I think most of the profession hasn't worked out what into.

The job moves to the front

Bookkeeping used to be one long middle. A client turned up with a carrier bag of receipts, and somebody spent days turning that mess into a set of numbers. The skill was in the processing, and the processing was most of the cost.

The processing is the bit that's going away. What's left, and what turns out to matter far more, is the start of the job.

Get the information right at the point it's created and everything downstream works. Get it wrong and no amount of clever software rescues it. So our bookkeepers are moving to the beginning of the relationship: sitting with a client in their first weeks of trading and teaching them how to organise themselves.

How to photograph a receipt at the moment you get it, rather than finding it in a coat pocket in January. How to keep the bank feed connected. How to keep the business account separate from the personal one. What a purchase invoice is and why it isn't the same as the card payment. Which things need a note attached and which don't.

That is a teaching job and a relationship job, and it is much harder than typing. It's also worth far more to the client, because a business whose records are clean all year knows what it's earning in March rather than finding out the following January.

We're training all our bookkeepers in this now, deliberately and ahead of the curve, because I'd rather they were ready a year early than a year late.

What we're actually taking out

I want to be precise about this, because "AI is doing the bookkeeping" is the kind of sentence that means nothing.

We are taking out the middle. The mundane processing. Keying receipts, typing up bank statements, coding transaction after transaction, posting routine journals.

Gone are the days when one of our bookkeepers sits down and analyses a spreadsheet line by line. That genuinely isn't happening any more. They look at what went into the system and they look at what came out the other end. They don't do the bit in between.

What they do instead is the judgement: setting the rules where the treatment isn't obvious, checking the work, and catching the things that are wrong. In effect, auditing the AI. That is a skilled job and it needs somebody who understands what the right answer looks like.

So why do we still take on juniors?

Because the traditional argument for hiring a junior — that somebody has to do the donkey work — was never the real reason. It was just the excuse.

Our UK juniors are being trained for the end of the job rather than the middle of it. Year-end accounts. Interim management reports. Sitting in front of a client and explaining what the numbers mean, where the business is losing money, and what they could do about their tax.

That's the work that was always squeezed out by the processing. Now there's room for it.

I'd add something that gets missed in the AI debate: you cannot audit the machine if you never learned to do the work yourself. Somebody who has only ever accepted what the software suggested has no instinct for when it's wrong. So we still train people properly. We just don't train them by making them type for three years first.

Yes, prices will come down

I'll say it plainly, because most of the profession is avoiding the question.

Bookkeeping prices are going to fall. They have to. When the labour comes out of a task, the price follows, and any firm telling you otherwise is hoping you don't notice.

That's not a problem for us, and here's the arithmetic. With the same number of staff, we expect to handle two to three times the client base. The fee per client goes down; the number of clients goes up; the work our people do becomes more interesting and more valuable. I'd take that trade every time.

The firms that will struggle are the ones whose entire model is charging for hours spent on processing. That fee line is disappearing and it isn't coming back.

What our own system does

We built eTax AI to do the middle part properly, and the honest description of it is this: it posts the great majority of transactions itself, and leaves the rest for a human.

In our own use, roughly 80% of transactions go through without anyone touching them. The remaining 20% come to a bookkeeper — either because the treatment isn't clear and a rule needs setting, or because something looks wrong and needs a person to look at it.

People ask how that differs from the document-capture tools the profession already uses, Dext being the obvious one. I want to be fair here, because Dext is a good product and we've used it.

Dext is a pre-accounting tool. It sits in front of your accounting software. It captures the document, reads it extremely accurately, and presents it for review — and by default a person then publishes it into the ledger. It can automate more than that: you can set supplier rules, turn on auto-publish, and it has machine learning that suggests categories based on how you've coded similar things before. As of this year it also has an AI assistant that proposes the treatment. But the automation is opt-in, and the rules are configured by a bookkeeper up front. Dext doesn't publish a figure for how much it posts with no human involvement, so I'm not going to invent one or pretend it posts nothing.

The distinction I'd draw is about where the judgement sits. Dext automates the typing superbly; deciding the treatment is still configured or confirmed by a person by default. We wanted the system to make the decision and the person to check it, rather than the person to make the decision and the system to speed up the typing.

There's also a cost point that's easy to miss, because you tend to look at one headline price rather than the stack. For a limited company, Dext isn't your accounting system. It publishes into Xero, QuickBooks or Sage — so there is a ledger subscription sitting underneath it that you're paying for as well.

And the newest part, the AI agent that proposes the coding for you, is a chargeable add-on rather than something included. Dext publishes it at £5 per client per month for accountancy practices and £7.50 a month for businesses, after a one-off trial of fifty suggestions. That's introductory pricing running to the end of October 2026, so check it before you rely on it.

To be fair to them, that add-on is the AI agent specifically. Supplier rules, auto-publish and the machine-learning categorisation are included in the standard plans and always have been. And Dext does have a separate product, Solo, that runs without a connected ledger — though it's scoped to MTD quarterly updates for sole traders and landlords, and still sits alongside your year-end software.

None of that makes Dext bad value for a practice processing thousands of documents. It's just worth adding up properly. A small business looking at the headline figure often isn't comparing like with like, because it's really two subscriptions and sometimes three.

That is a difference in design philosophy, not a claim that one product is broken. Reasonable people build these things differently.

Who does what, and why it's all qualified people

One more thing, because it's the part I feel strongest about.

Our team in Lahore are all chartered accountants. Every one. That was a deliberate decision and it costs us more than the alternative.

The direction we're going in is that every role left in this firm is one that requires judgement — and judgement comes either from qualification or from real experience, and I'd never dismiss the second. Some of the best people I've worked with in thirty years never sat the exams. What's disappearing isn't the unqualified person; it's the unqualified task.

When there's no processing left to hide behind, everybody in the building is either advising a client, teaching a client, or checking the work. That's a higher bar for everyone, us included.

Where this ends up

I don't think bookkeeping is dying. I think it's being turned inside out.

The value used to be at the end — a set of accounts, delivered nine months after the year it described. It's moving to the front: getting the client set up properly, keeping the information clean as it happens, and telling them what it means while they can still do something about it.

Our bookkeepers will be more useful than they have ever been. They just won't be typing.

eTax AI does bookkeeping and tax for small UK businesses from £17 a month — AI does the processing, chartered accountants sign it off.