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The craziest thing BlackLine's AI learned

Thursday, December 18, 2025

AI Accounting Daily
Hey, Accounting Pros!
Welcome back to AI Accounting Daily.
AI at BlackLine is now making judgment calls you thought only seniors could handle. We will see what happens when it gets those calls wrong at scale. Vertex and CPA.com claim they can take every sales tax task off your plate. You will want to know which firms believe them and are cutting staff. And we look at 2025 CFOs told to cut hard and still grow.

Latest in Accounting AI

1

BlackLine's AI Does the Judgment Calls Now

BlackLine's AI is making judgment calls now. Categorizing transactions. Flagging anomalies. Deciding what's material. The stuff you thought was safe because it required 'professional expertise.' The AI learned that intuition in months. You spent years. And someone still has to catch when it's wrong.
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2

Vertex and CPA.com Are Automating Sales Tax. All of It.

Vertex and CPA.com say they're automating sales tax. The whole thing. Exemption certificates, multi-state filing, nexus tracking. All of it. You've heard "all of it" before. This one might actually mean it.
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3

CFOs Must Cut Costs and Grow. At the Same Time.

Cut costs. Also grow. That's the 2025 CFO mandate. Not a sequence. Both at once. Nearly half of finance leaders ranked cost efficiency as their top priority. The rest said growth. Spoiler: everyone's being asked to deliver both. The strategy that actually works? Still being figured out.
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AI Applications

1. 🤝 zoominfo prioritizes ideal client segments and buyer intent data so accounting firms can build a predictable pipeline and profitably grow their advisory services.

2. 🤝 Dealfront automates website visitor identification and lead enrichment so firm owners identify high-intent prospects, build a predictable sales pipeline, and grow advisory revenue.

3. Hume AI powers empathic voice interfaces for client support so firms deliver more personalized, human-like responses while maintaining high-volume communication across all digital channels.

4. Windsor ai consolidates cross-channel data into live dashboards so firm owners eliminate manual Excel reconciliation and provide clients with proactive, data-backed advisory insights.

5. 🧾 Shoeboxed automates receipt scanning and expense categorization so accounting firms eliminate manual data entry, reduce errors, and gain accurate, auditable client expense records.

6. 🤝 Softr builds secure, no-code client portals and live dashboards to automate client document collection, eliminating version chaos and freeing capacity for advisory.

Updates in AI

1

Google’s Gemini 3 Flash Is Stupid Fast (and Cheap)

Google just dropped an AI that processes 750,000 words for fifteen cents. 2x faster than the last version. 4x cheaper. Free tier with 500 requests a day. That excuse you've been using about AI being too expensive to test? Yeah, it's gone.
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2

Palantir Claims AI Means You Hire More, Not Less

Palantir says AI means you hire more people. Not fewer. The company selling AI to governments and Fortune 500s thinks the real bottleneck isn't headcount. It's finding people who can ask the right questions. Spoiler: most firms aren't screening for that.
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3

OpenAI Quietly Downgrades Free ChatGPT to the Cheap Stuff

OpenAI switched free ChatGPT to a cheaper model. Same name. Same interface. Worse outputs. They didn't announce it. If your results have felt dumber lately, you weren't imagining things. You were just the last to know.
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Prompt Ideas

Create Diagnostic Prompts to Troubleshoot Sync Errors

**Role:** You are a **QuickBooks automation support specialist** who writes diagnostic prompts to resolve sync issues between QuickBooks and other tools. **Action:** Create **diagnostic troubleshooting prompts** for identifying and fixing **[INSERT SYNC ERROR TYPE]** in **QuickBooks + [INSERT APP NAME]**. **Context:** - Audience: internal accounting tech team or support staff - Goal: systematically identify and resolve syncing or data mismatch issues - Tone: technical, logical, and concise - Style: checklist or diagnostic question format - Variables: - **App Name:** [Zapier / Gusto / Shopify / HubSpot / Stripe] - **Sync Error Type:** [Duplicate Data / Missing Invoices / Mismatched Accounts] - **QuickBooks Version:** [Online / Desktop] - Structure: 1. Describe the sync issue 2. List initial diagnostic questions 3. Outline verification steps 4. Provide resolution paths 5. Include post-fix testing steps - Output Length: **200–300 words**

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Client uploaded one giant PDF. I didn't cry.

Client uploaded one giant PDF. I didn't cry.

It was 87 pages. W-2s. Bank statements. A 2019 grocery receipt. Six copies of the same 1099.

All in one unholy PDF named "tax stuff final."


I used to spend an hour splitting these apart. Renaming. Sorting. Double-checking I didn't miss anything buried on page 73.


That's not accounting. That's unpaid IT work.


I switched to Canopy. Now? The AI rips the PDF apart.

Matches each doc to my checklist. Renames them using my firm's naming rules.

I didn't touch anything.


Stop sorting. Start working. Use Canopy.