There seems to be this dream of Tax AI Software that will just do all of the taxes. But other than using AI as a fancy text search, I don't see it happening for a long long time. LLMs can't do arithmetic or count.

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Havoc 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah - classifying an invoice into building rent or say printer ink it'll have some success. So we'll see some of it at the very bottom end.

>LLMs can't do arithmetic or count.

Yes. The fancy copilot stuff does use pandas/python to look at excel files so stuff like add up a table does work sometimes, but the parameters going into the pandas code need to make sense too in the garbage in garbage out sense. The base LLM doesn't seem to understand the grid nature of Excel so it ends up looking at the wrong cells or misunderstands how headings relate to the numbers etc.

It'll get better but there doesn't seem to be the equivalent of "use LLM to write boilerplate code" in this world.

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rwmj 5 days ago | parent [-]

We use Concur (SAP? expenses software), and it can scan your paper receipts and fill in the fields for you. I'd say it's about 30% accurate. Occasionally it'll be incredible. But mostly you end up having to manually adjust fields. It even gets categories completely wrong, like classifying a train ticket as a phone bill. All this means you spend a lot of time checking everything. It'd be hard for me to say honestly that it saves any time, and probably it takes a bit more time.

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ecshafer 5 days ago | parent [-]

Concur might be the worst software I have ever used.

	▲	rwmj 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ha ha, yes it's bad, but somehow slightly better than the enterprise alternatives.