Case study: How one accounting firm implemented AI

Adam Turner

The article is relevant to members in Australia and New Zealand and was current at the time of publication.

Increasing revenue while saving on admin wages, Smart Business Solutions’ in-house AI initiatives let accountants spend less time shuffling paperwork and more time helping clients.

Smart Business Solutions Group was founded in 2007 by Director Shannon Smit, after working internationally and deciding against a Big 4 partner position in New York. Instead, she hung out her own shingle, initially running the business from her spare room. 

Today, the award-winning accounting, mortgage broking and financial planning firm has a headcount of 22, built on organic growth rather than acquisitions.

Employee shortages spur change

Faced with workforce shortages in 2020, the growing business outsourced some task-driven processes overseas, but the work was soon brought back in-house due to time zone challenges and quality concerns.

Rather than continue the search for an outsourcing partner, the business decided to investigate the potential for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to handle both administrative tasks and financial paperwork that was too sensitive to outsource.

RPA bots let businesses automate repetitive tasks – such as entering data and processing forms – that have traditionally been performed manually by people but can be handled by codified rules.

Just as industrial robots progressed from spot welding cars to handling more intricate tasks, improvements in RPA allow these administrative bots to handle processes that require a greater level of dexterity. 

More control in-house

After the challenges of collaborating with offshore workers, RPA promised to give the business greater control and higher-quality results, says Smart Business Solutions Partner Josh Underhill.

“The offshore outsourcing partner was just blindly following steps without thinking more broadly about the nature of the tasks, which made quality an issue,” Underhill says.

“It made sense to bring those tasks back in-house where we had more direct control over RPA’s workflows and outputs.”

Smart Business Solutions engaged the services of an RPA consultant, which proved to be expensive at $3,200 per automated process along with $5,000 in monthly licensing fees.

In return, progress was slow; after eight months only one RPA bot was operational and processing BAS paperwork. Its rigid yet fragile design made the bot difficult to scale and easily broken by software updates.

“During that RPA trial, we found the problem was less the technology and more the disconnect between our accountants and their programmers,” Underhill says.

“We knew what we wanted RPA to do but didn’t have the technical know-how to convey it. At the same time, their programming team lacked the accounting knowledge to translate our requests.”

How to build your own bots

Rather than give up on the technology, Smart Business Solutions decided to upskill its own team of accountants to work with free and open-source RPA tools such as UiPath and Microsoft’s Power Automate.

Two days of onsite training with SkyBots Singapore’s RPA and AI Expert Trainer Daryl Aw, was enough for the business to embark on its own development journey, using both RPA and AI tools like ChatGPT.

“This was just as ChatGPT went mainstream, allowing people without a technical background to start programming,” Underhill says. “We quickly built our own RPA bot using Power Automate and ChatGPT to process BAS paperwork.”

“The key to our success isn’t just about easy access to technology, it is also about an internal culture where AI is an opportunity rather than a threat.”

RPA bots run on desktop computers, as if someone was sitting at the keyboard. The ability to enter data and switch between applications lets RPA mimic a person going through repetitive workflows.

Smart Business Solutions is using RPA to work with Xero, Xero Practice Manager, FYI document management and Xplan financial advice and wealth management. Along with Business Activity Statements, bots handle Instalment Activity Statements and prepping work papers.

Having RPA draft tax planning and year-end letters is on the road map, but the business has strict rules around ensuring RPA’s work is double-checked and signed off by an employee.

“Nothing goes out without it being reviewed by a real person and the technology never interacts directly with clients,” Underhill says.

“RPA is simply a backend tool to help our accountants be more productive, but it certainly doesn’t replace them or absolve them of responsibility for actions and decisions.”

The bottom line: tangible results

In the 2025 financial year, RPA delivered Smart Business Solutions a 14 per cent uplift in revenue. With this came a 23.6 per cent reduction in administrative wages, replacing two long-term employees with a single junior, through natural attrition rather than layoffs.

Accountants are also more productive, with RPA allowing them to spend less time on basic paperwork and more time focused on higher-value tasks that still require the human touch, such as meeting with clients.

Adopt Agentic AI

Building on its success with RPA to quickly accomplish repetitive tasks, Smart Business Solutions is also embracing more complex AI agents like Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude.

AI is a powerful tool for synthesising large amounts of information to provide a starting point when writing analysis, Underhill says. Even so, it can still be “confidently wrong” and requires strict oversight.

“Copilot is a great research assistant that speeds up the process of collating data, so as an accountant, you can spend more time on analysis and teasing out threads,” he says.

“That said, we all know AI makes mistakes and you can’t inherently trust it – nothing that AI produces should ever make it into a report without the kind of robust fact-checking that you would apply to any junior research assistant.”