The Value of Human Advice

One of the most frequent problems I see when a new bookkeeping client walks in the door is that they consulted the University of Facebook.

This week I have an existing corporate client who set up a Health Spending Account for himself and his family.  He was wondering how to do the bookkeeping entries for this and so consulted, wait for it, not Facebook at least, but ChatGPT.

It told him to setup an asset account, transfer funds in, and then a bunch of transfer and expensing transactions for each expense.

The problem?  Context. This advice was for a company that administers it's own HSA, not a company that uses a Third Party Administrator (which, by the way, is the only way to ensure deductibility of the health expense in Canada).

The second problem?  He spent several hours setting this up and entering all this data for the past year and his time was all wasted.  It all has to be reversed because, mostly, he messed it up.

Get the right advice, in the right context!  Even AI needs to have expert human oversight to validate the answers.