Accounting firms: three assistants to build before summer

The principle: three angles, not thirty tools

At first read, an accounting firm has twenty possible AI use cases. The trap is trying to cover ten. The rule we deploy at our client firms: three assistants, three angles, three audiences.

1. Doctrine — for partners and engagement managers.
2. Client — for the staff preparing a file.
3. Firm — for everyone, on internal questions.

Assistant 1 · Doctrine

Sources: your tax monitoring (archived BOFiP, legal handbooks, news bulletins), your internal doctrine notes, your anonymized past consultations.

Typical volume: 800 to 2,500 documents. Audience: 4 to 10 people (partners + engagement managers). Benefit: shifting from “let me reread my 2022 note” to “pull every case where we ruled this way.”

Critical guardrail: always cite the precise source. No extrapolation. If doctrine is silent, the assistant must say so.

Assistant 2 · Client (one per sensitive file)

Sources: the documents from the active client file — balance sheets, trial balances, contracts, letters, email threads. Strictly watertight per file.

Typical volume: 100 to 800 documents per file. Audience: 1 to 3 staff on this specific file. Benefit: preparing a checkpoint or one-off engagement in 20 minutes instead of half a day.

Critical guardrail: no cross-leakage. The Lambert file assistant knows nothing about Durand. A leak here isn’t a slip; it’s professional misconduct.

Assistant 3 · Firm

Sources: your intranet, your quality procedures, your HR sheets, your letter templates, your remote-work policy. Anything internal and not client-confidential.

Typical volume: 200 to 600 documents. Audience: the whole firm. Benefit: 80% of “where is the template for…” questions disappear.

Pre-summer timeline

From mid-April to mid-July, here’s what works: 4 weeks for the Firm assistant (1 week prep, 1 week ingestion, 2 weeks live use), 6 weeks for Doctrine, and 2 weeks for the first Client assistant (in parallel with the others). Total: 12 weeks elapsed, and you reach the August break with everything running.

Also read: the full ingestion method and the seven sovereignty criteria, essential on the professional secrecy side.