Tests show AI can cut a one-hour bookkeeping review to about 5 minutes

Avi Santoso, a software engineer and finance automation consultant in Perth, Australia, says AI could cut a one-hour bookkeeping review to about 5 minutes. That is his own estimate, taken from a third-quarter 2026 research roundup he published.

What the tests found

• Xero, Hubdoc and Dext all totaled invoices correctly, but only Hubdoc and Dext captured the GST (Australia's sales tax) on every invoice.
• All three tools misrecorded currency on an overseas invoice payable in Japanese yen.
• A small AI model trained on 600 made-up supplier bills sorted expenses into 8 categories correctly 99.5% of the time, up from 70.5%.

The 5-minute estimate came from testing Xero and Codex on read-only work. The AI suggested account codes, flagged missing receipts and drafted emails asking for documents. It did not post or match entries on its own. It waited for a person to approve. The 99.5% score was measured on 200 test examples held back from training.

What to keep in mind

The results come from a press release about the consultant's own testing. The material does not say how many invoices were tested or whether anyone else has repeated the results. The full summary is on his website.

His method is to give AI one narrow task, write down its limits, check its output, then add more. For anyone doing their own books, that points to starting small and checking tax amounts and foreign currency by hand.