Accrual, a tax, audit, client accounting, and advisory platform for accounting firms, has unveiled Arc, an AI agent platform that allows firms to delegate complex, multi-step work across their existing systems.
Practitioners give Arc an objective, approve its plan, and receive the completed work for review—from Excel workbooks and client reports to analyses and workpapers, the San Francisco-based company says.
Accrual rolled out Arc with 20 agents for common accounting firm workflows, with new agents added each week. Accounting firms can also teach Arc their own processes, save them as reusable agents, share them across teams, and schedule recurring work.
According to Accrual, Arc gathers information it has permission to access, asks questions when something material is unclear, and proposes a plan. Once approved by a practitioner, Arc works across connected systems to combine information, perform calculations, and produce the requested deliverable.
Jobs can run for minutes or hours, with multiple assignments underway at once, Accrual says. Practitioners can move on to other work, then review the results alongside a record of the sources, tools, and actions used to produce them.
Recommended Articles
“The breakthrough isn’t simply giving accountants access to a more capable AI model. It’s giving that model the context, tools, controls, and accounting-specific understanding required to do real work,” Siddarth Chandrasekaran, co-founder and chief technology officer of Accrual, said in a statement on Sept. 22.
Firms can teach Arc how they handle tax notices, for example: review the notice against client records and firm templates, identify missing information, ask questions, and prepare supporting work after the practitioner approves the plan.
Once they’re satisfied with the process, the practitioner can save it as an agent for others to use. The next practitioner starts with the firm’s established approach. Teams can also schedule agents to handle recurring work.
Arc works alongside Accrual’s workflow products to handle investigations, analyses, and other assignments that span systems. Permissions, recorded actions, and human review are built into the process; practitioners retain responsibility for final judgment and approval, the company says.
Arc is available now to Accrual customers. More information can be found here.
Photo caption: Accrual co-founders Cosmin Nicolaescu (left) and Siddarth Chandrasekaran.
Sign in to get access to this free resource, and all of our whitepapers and reports.
Download this content today!
Register Now Already registered? Click here to Log In
