I Don't Need You Anymore

For about ten years, I paid professionals to keep my books. CPAs and bookkeepers, more than one of each. I spent somewhere around $100,000 on professional services over that stretch, and at the end of it, two years of my accounting still wasn’t done.

Then I spent three days with ChatGPT and finished it: the reconciliations, the closings, and years of loans that had been coded wrong. They were long, hard days, and nothing about them was automatic.

Those three days showed me something about my own leadership that I would rather have learned ten years and a hundred thousand dollars earlier.

The Comfort of Being Covered

The professionals were not worthless. Some of what they did was useful. Mostly, though, what I bought was a feeling.

The feeling went like this: it’s handled. Someone with credentials has it, so I can go run the business and the numbers will take care of themselves. Every invoice reinforced it. If I was paying, the work must be happening.

It wasn’t. Some of them kept billing and simply didn’t do the work. Others did it so badly that I had to go back and redo it myself. Either way, the invoices kept coming, and the feeling stayed intact long after the facts stopped supporting it.

I have to own my part. I kept paying. Year after year, I told myself that handing off the books was what a busy leader does, that my time was better spent elsewhere, and that the right professional would eventually get it right. I called it delegation. In practice it was distance, and distance from your own numbers is expensive in ways that never show up on an invoice.

Responsibility follows physics. What you defer compounds. One sloppy month becomes a quarter that won’t reconcile, and that quarter becomes years of miscoded loans, until the mess is big enough that nobody wants to touch it.

Finally doing the work myself has made me question the accuracy of everything they ever handed me. That is the real price of a false sense of security. The fees were only part of it; the larger cost was the certainty I thought I was buying.

The Evidence Was There the Whole Time

My books are complex because my business is complex: several ventures, loans, payroll, sales tax, and years of decisions that only make sense if you were there when they were made.

Here is what I didn’t understand until those three days. Almost none of it was missing. Every bank statement, every loan payment, every sales tax filing, and every receipt already existed somewhere. Some of it was in my email. Some was in Google Drive. Some was in QuickBooks, and the rest sat behind the logins for the loan and sales tax portals. The record of my business was complete. It was just scattered across five places that never talked to each other.

Every professional I hired needed me to bring it to them. Gather the statements, export the reports, find the emails, and send it all over in a form they could work with. With books spread across that many systems, that step was the job, and it never got finished.

I happen to be the kind of person who can recall a $5.36 transaction from four years ago if you prompt me well enough. For a decade, that memory was the only thing connecting all those scattered records. It was the filing cabinet, and a filing cabinet that lives in one man’s head doesn’t scale.

Three Days

This time, I gave the AI access to the sources themselves: my email, Google Drive, QuickBooks, and the loan and sales tax portals. It downloaded local copies of bank statements and records wherever it could, and where it couldn’t download something, it took a screenshot. It worked from copies of the record, not from guesses about it.

I’ll be honest about the security question, because readers will ask it. I’m less worried than most people. A skilled hacker or the government can get into my accounts if they want to, and I’ve accepted that. Your tolerance may differ, and you should decide it on purpose. Working from local copies, giving access only to the accounts the job requires, and rotating passwords when the work is done are good habits whatever you decide.

The more important control was one I set before any work began. I told the AI to ask me before making any change. Every transaction adjustment in QuickBooks Online came to me first, and I approved each one myself.

The work it brought me was precise. One example: a $359.41 payroll tax withdrawal made by QuickBooks matched a February debit from one of my banks, but the payroll record named a different bank. The bank’s side of that same debit had also been booked separately to federal payroll tax. The AI caught the mismatch, explained that both records had to be corrected together, and would not propose the fix until it had checked the original bank links. In the same pass, it refused to treat an unconfirmed credit as money I could count on. That is forensic accounting, done to the penny, with the evidence attached.

Then it suggested the next instruction for me to send:

Go ahead and trace the January–March 2025 payroll bank transition and the $304.34 return. Check the original bank links and show me the exact corrections before posting anything. Keep all holds pending.

It had absorbed my rule. Show me before you change anything had stopped being something I had to enforce and had become part of how the work ran.

My memory still mattered. When the records ran out, it asked me direct questions, and I answered them. But it needed me far less than any human I had hired, because it went to the evidence instead of waiting for me to deliver it.

The Lever and the Hand

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. ~ Archimedes

A lever multiplies force. On its own, it multiplies nothing. Somebody has to stand somewhere and push.

In 2023, researchers from Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group put that idea to a real test. They gave 758 BCG consultants a set of realistic consulting tasks, some with access to GPT-4 and some without. On tasks the AI handled well, the consultants using it completed 12.2 percent more work, finished 25.1 percent faster, and produced results rated more than 40 percent higher in quality. On a task that sat just outside what the AI could do reliably, the consultants using it were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the right answer than the ones working on their own. They trusted the output and stopped judging it.

The researchers called the boundary between those two outcomes a jagged frontier, and it describes my three days exactly. The AI was extraordinary at volume, cross-referencing, and method: reading every record, matching them, and knowing how a loan should be coded or a period closed. It had no way to know what a transaction meant to my business. That part was mine, and the approval rule guaranteed I could never stop doing it.

The tool extends the craftsman. The craftsman does not become the tool. A lot of leaders are asking which people AI can replace. The better question is what work it makes possible for the person who already holds the knowledge and refuses to stop judging. The human in the loop isn’t a safety feature. The human in the loop is the point.

What I Keep, and What I Hire

I’m keeping my CPA. Taxes need a licensed professional’s judgment and signature, and I want someone qualified reviewing the books I cleaned up before anything is filed. That work is worth hiring.

What changed is where I draw the line. A tax return can only be as accurate as the books underneath it. If the books are wrong, the return is wrong, no matter who signs it. Owning my books is how my CPA’s work gets to be right.

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. ~ Proverbs 27:23

That instruction is nearly three thousand years old, and it doesn’t say to hire someone to know the state of your flocks. It says you know. For most of my career, I knew what every transaction was and never once had the whole picture in front of me, clean and true.

So when I say I don’t need you anymore, I’m talking to the arrangement: the idea that a leader can stand at arm’s length from his own numbers and call it delegation. That comfortable distance cost me ten years and a hundred thousand dollars.

I don’t need it anymore.

Own your books. Hire the signature.