EXPOSED
The bulk of hours at the national median go to reconciliations, journal entries, transaction tie-outs, variance schedules, tax return prep and workpaper documentation — all structured text-and-number work that AI plus modern ledger software already does at usable quality. What survives is the part where a licensed human signs: the audit opinion, the tax position taken under ambiguous law, the materiality and going-concern call, and the conversation with a client or audit committee about what the numbers actually mean. This title bundles the staff accountant (highly exposed) with the CPA partner and controller (well protected); the modal worker sits closer to the exposed end.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. A 7 reflects that bank and intercompany reconciliations, three-way match testing, sampling selection, depreciation schedules, and Form 1120/1065 preparation from a trial balance are now largely tool-driven, while a residue of hours — walkthroughs of a client's controls, chasing an unexplained accrual through emails and contracts, drafting footnote disclosures for a new revenue arrangement — still requires someone assembling facts nobody has coded yet, which is why this sits at the top of the automatable band rather than at 3.
Fully desk- and screen-based. A 2 covers the thin physical tail: inventory observation counts on a warehouse floor at year-end, fixed-asset existence checks, and cash counts at a client site, which for the median accountant is a few days a year against a calendar of ERP screens, Excel, and workpaper software.
Licensed human required and personally liable. An 11 sits just inside the licensed band because the CPA licence is legally load-bearing only at the top of the workpaper — the engagement partner signs the opinion and faces PCAOB sanction, state board discipline, and Section 10A exposure, while the staff and senior accountants who do most of the tick-and-tie, and the entire uncredentialled corporate accounting population under a controller, hold no licence that anyone must have on file.
Some relationship component. A 10 reflects that clients rehire the partner and the controller keeps the CFO's confidence through years of knowing which estimates that company fudges, but the reconciliation and return-prep work below that is routinely offshored to shared service centres and rotated among staff without a client noticing — the relationship carries the engagement, not the deliverable.
Meaningful discretion. A 12 marks the genuine discretion that exists — setting materiality thresholds, deciding whether a contingency is probable and estimable under ASC 450, taking a tax position on economic substance, judging whether management's going-concern plans are realistic — against the fact that most of these calls run through GAAP, IRS regulation, and firm methodology templates with a reviewer above the preparer, so the ambiguous call is escalated rather than owned by the person who found it.
Lawyers SAFE
CNBC reports Goldman Sachs is deploying Anthropic's Claude to automate work in accounting and compliance functions.
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