Ever wonder how you can apply text classification in accounting? Recently, when I was doing accounting for my company, I realized that I have to do justice in order to classify the accounting entries. I will have to classify them to the right chart of accounts based on their description. I find that this process can be simplified with artificial intelligence as we already have plenty of data to work with. This is when text classification comes into place. We already have data from accounting systems that we can export out. Once this is done, it will be easy to train a text classifier to classify accounting entries into the right chart of accounts.

What is Text Classification?

So, what exactly is text classification? Text classification is the task of assigning a set of predefined categories to free text. Text classifiers can be used to organize, structure, and categorize pretty much anything. For example, articles can be organized by topics, support tickets can be organized by urgency, brand mentions can be organized by sentiment, and so on. An example is, “The user interface is pretty straightforward and easy to use.” A classifier can take this text as an input, analyze its content, and then and automatically assign relevant tags, such as “UI” and “easy to use”.

What Are The Advantages?

Firstly, you can save your accountants time when using text classification. As we are confident of our text classification model, we can let the robot do the accounting entries. This saves our accounts time, allowing them to focus on more important tasks at hand.

Secondly, human workers are not able to work 24/7. They are prone to mistakes and they might not be consistent with their work. Especially if you have more than one accountant, their way of interpreting text might be different, making the results inconsistent.

This is why it is better to use a robot to do your work for you instead. When using our machine learning software, it guarantees efficiency, consistency, and zero errors. Our robot is also able to work 24/7 without rest!

How To Use?

Our cognitive robot is easy to use. Once we have exported the data into CSV format, we can do a clean-up of words that are deemed unnecessary. This process will only take a day. You can then use the data to train the software to do text classification. This will only take a few hours and then the robot is ready to work for you! If you want it to be faster, you may want to use cloud computing. However, you will need to learn how to do that.

Why is A.I Not Commonly Used in Accounting?

As cognitive automation software is relatively new, most users are not aware of its existence. We are also used to doing repetitive tasks by ourselves all this while. Accountants are also not trained or taught to use artificial intelligence as part of their job scope. However, with the growing awareness and marketing of A.I, using robots in accounting will be a norm in the near future. When you need a cognitive solution, remember to look for us.

Contact us now for a FREE 1-hour consultation!

Written by: Christopher Lim & Elicia Yeo