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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Automating Finance Controls: How SafeBooksAI Is Revolutionizing Enterprise Accounting
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Financial data is money—yet most enterprises struggle to ensure its integrity across the numerous systems they use. Every CFO faces the challenge of validating transactions that flow through billing, ERP, payroll, spend management, and other platforms, often relying on manual processes that can't scale with business growth.
In this fascinating conversation with Ahikam Kaufman CEO of SafeBooks.AI, we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the office of the CFO by automating internal controls—the critical yet tedious validation processes that ensure financial accuracy and compliance. Unlike traditional accounting automation that focuses on transactions themselves, SafeBooksAI targets the governance layer, helping finance teams monitor 100% of their data in real-time.
The stakes couldn't be higher. As Ahikam explains, even exceptional finance leaders can't manually oversee every data point in a large organization, as evidenced by recent high-profile accounting errors at major corporations. For growing companies, especially tech unicorns experiencing rapid expansion, maintaining proper financial controls becomes exponentially more challenging. Those preparing for potential public offerings need to establish robust governance years in advance—not scramble at the last minute.
What makes this approach particularly powerful is its "zero trust" philosophy borrowed from cybersecurity but tailored for finance. The system constantly monitors for anomalies and discrepancies, flagging only what requires human attention. This allows finance professionals to apply their expertise strategically rather than waste time on data crunching.
Looking ahead, SafeBooksAI is building partnerships with advisory firms to not just recommend controls but implement automated solutions that monitor them continuously. Through AI that can mesh differently-labeled data across systems and answer natural language queries, they're creating a future where audits and compliance become less burdensome while providing greater assurance.
Ready to transform how your finance team operates? Discover how automation can turn financial controls from a necessary evil into a strategic advantage that prevents errors, reduces risk, and frees your team to focus on what truly matters.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, fascinating chat today as we look at the intersection of finance and AI with a new innovator in the space at safebooksai Akif. How are you?
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm doing great. How about yourself? Thank you for having me. I'm truly excited to come.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. I'm really intrigued by the mission and work you guys are doing at SafeBooks. Maybe start with some introductions. What's the big idea, the big picture behind SafeBooks, and what was the origin story that sparked the idea?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'd like to think that today there's a huge gap between finance organization or finance teams and their ability to perform all their duties, given the complexity of the data they need to deal with.
Speaker 2:The office of the CFO today, or enterprise financial software is fully democratized and each company can run a dozen, if not more, financial systems, and there's like an inherent gap between our abilities as finance teams to be able to do our job and the access to data and our ability to check data integrity and completeness.
Speaker 2:And that's where we come to play, and the inspiration for that was many years ago in other parts of the enterprise, where a lot of automation was created to help facilitate large volume of transactions and be able to monitor them end-to-end for various purposes, for various purposes, like in cyber, in DevOps and really in finance. Today you're missing like a tool or the capability to be able to check a transaction that navigates through multiple systems for data integrity and data completeness and just the accuracy. And we all know that finance data is money, so it's sensitive, it's subject to compliance, it's subject to very strict timelines. So how do you do all of that? So there's like a gap between our ability as accountants to be able to deal with these masses of data and the toolbox we're given.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So at one level, you're at a very simple level. Perhaps you're automating accounting with AI. Is that oversimplistic, or what are you looking to take off, let's say, a founder's plate in terms of finance?
Speaker 2:If I may add, I will add just another small level of complexity. So accounting automation is definitely necessary, but the more automation you have in finance. One of the pillars of the accounting world in the enterprise is the ability to check everything. Not to just to operate but to check, not to transact but to check. It's called internal controls and we are not automating the operational part, we're automating the control part. How do you check hundreds of data points on a weekly, on a monthly basis? How do you document that? That's what we're doing. So the way to think about it is not like how you transact your bill pay, how you transact your collection, your billing, but how do you check and validate that? That's like very specific job. You have new data every week, every month. You have to perform a lot of repetitive tasks around data and until today, people just do them manually with spreadsheets.
Speaker 1:Oh, don't even get us started about spreadsheets. That's the bane of my existence. But you know, let's talk AI tools in the finance space. I mean, I use QuickBooks as a small business owner and I still have to pay a very good but expensive accountant to run the books. So who is this targeted at? Is it people like me? Is it startups, e-commerce players, large enterprises? Who is all the above maybe?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, as an accent to it, I tell you that I appreciate the fact you're a QuickBooks user and that's an amazing platform. However, quickbooks is meant to cater to small businesses, large companies. They run on large systems and ELP is only one of them. They do have systems for billing, for quoting, for order management, for spend, for HRIS, for payroll, for T&E, for travel, and they have to constantly check the data across the systems. You, as a small business owner, you trust your accountant and your platform to do, and that's fine. Large companies, when they're audited, when they're public, they have to perform a set of activities, hundreds of activities, every single week or month, in order not just to transact their data but to validate and substantiate the integrity of the data, and that's where we play in. So we cater to large companies, typically hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues or above, and we help them automate these specific tasks that sometimes are not even doable manually. They're impossible to do manually because you have so much data.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. So enterprises have whole departments dedicated to finance, but even large, growing startups here in San Francisco have pretty much outsourced a lot of that activity to players and I won't name names and so they don't have a direct relationship, maybe with their books. How do you see that world evolving? What are some lessons you might offer mistakes that you see those unicorn startups fast-growing startups make when it comes to accounting?
Speaker 2:I think at any point given point in time, unicorn companies, they have to start thinking about whether they want to go public or not. And typically you'll see companies today I think today the bar I'd like to think it's around at least 400, $500 million in revenues it used to be lower, but we do see companies around $250 million starting to think about their processes, their corporate governance and all of that. And that's where you start to realize their corporate governance and all of that and that's where you start to realize that if you want to become a public company one day, you can start on day minus one. You have to start two years before or even more time before that. So our ability to help companies to fully govern the data, avoid mistakes, avoid issues, avoid leakage, is essential in that process.
Speaker 2:The unique thing about technology companies unicorn is sometimes they can experience massive growth. So, unlike traditional companies, tech companies can grow 50% year over year. They can grow 100% or 200% year over year. And you know such massive growth comes with a lot of challenges how you keep your arms around everything you need to do and in the finance organization. How do you keep your arms around everything you need to do and in the finance organization? How do you keep your controls, how you keep your data safe in terms of the accuracy and the completeness of the data? And this is where I think we can help these companies.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, let's talk trust. There's very little trust of anyone or anything these days. Sadly, we even have a term for it in cybersecurity. We call it zero trust. You don't trust anything or anyone. But how do you ensure the accuracy and compliance when you're handling sensitive financial data and why should new clients trust you? How do you ensure that trust and why should new clients trust you?
Speaker 2:How do you ensure that trust? That's a great question, ivan. So, first of all, we use the same term zero trust and basically what we tell prospects and customers. Listen, let's look at all your protocols, all the activities you're doing to validate the data, your protocols, all the activities you're doing to validate the data. And because a machine can do it, the machine can do it in real time. It can do it across 100% of the data and across multiple systems.
Speaker 2:So, just like cybersecurity, we'd like to think that we are maybe the cyber finance in that respect, by helping you constantly protect your data.
Speaker 2:Unlike cybersecurity, when we identify a pattern or an anomaly or a discrepancy, you can immediately, as a finance team, as a company's finance team, you can check it because you're familiar with the data, it's your own data.
Speaker 2:So, unlike cyber, where you see a pattern and you don't know who's sitting, like maybe 1,000 miles on the other side of the world trying to maybe hack or penetrate your company, here what we help you do, we help you navigate through millions of transactions and flag or signal these which you need to check or validate, which you need to check or validate. And because you're familiar with your own data, it's very easy for you to be able to witness yourself the value of the platform, because we help you focus your time on the specific transactions or cases or issues which requires your attention, as opposed to just check everything, or as opposed to just check everything, or as opposed to not check everything or check a fraction. So in the finance world, your ability to check the insights and the findings and validate them and remediate them is much better. You just need assistance with how to get to these, which requires the actions Brilliant.
Speaker 1:So that kind of begs the question about the future role of the accountant and how that will evolve in this age of AI and Gen AI. On one extreme we're going to replace all the CPAs. On the other, we're just giving them superpowers and, of course, everything in between. Do you have a perspective on this? You must get asked that question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to think that, you know, a hundred years ago, people ran finance and accounting without systems. No one wants to go back to that. I think the same is here. What AI and automation allows us to do is allowing us to focus the team's time on things that matter and bring into use their talent and their knowledge, as opposed to data crunching and number crunching, crunching and number crunching.
Speaker 2:So I'd like to think that you know where the world is going to the tedious tasks which which will people just feel a hole, but and they they have to do it because there's no other way right For account.
Speaker 2:You know, we talked about that gap in data which doesn't allow finance team to actually do their job well because they have limited access to data. So I'd like to think that a machine can do a much better job in being able to do repetitive tasks scanning millions of transactions across multiple data points and allow you to focus your time on remediation, on doing much more meaningful decision making actions, as opposed to data crunching, pulling data, and you know these sorts of things. So that's kind of my view and I think, once it happens, we can go back. So I think a lot of people talk about how jobs and the job market is going to change, but I think eventually we'd like to get away from repetitive manual tasks, which maybe they're exciting on the first week, but on the second year they're boring, they're repetitive, they're difficult and a machine can do a much better job, allowing us to focus on more strategic tasks.
Speaker 1:A wonderful sentiment. So we're in this period of doing more with less spell tightening as to focus on more strategic tasks. A wonderful sentiment. So we're in this period of doing more with less belt tightening, sometimes reducing team sizes. But when you win over a customer, let's say a CFO, what is your value proposition? How do you pitch your platform or service and show the ROI, the investment return?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. Actually, we developed an ROI Steve Sovick, our chief software developer an ROI calculator, but we start with the manual work In what we do, which is like automating your internal controls. There are a lot of additional value points like avoiding leakage. As we said before, financial data is money. Every time you check the data better, you avoid paying an invoice twice, you avoid missing billing a customer, you don't leave money on the table. Then you have the value of compliance, which sometimes you can't price it right. What's the value of compliance? Then you have the value of trusting the data data integrity, because we check the data. But first and foremost, it's the ability to automate repetitive tasks. That today requires putting bodies on the problem. An example I would give is those who follow the accounting world. A few months ago, a large company, macy's. They've announced that they've had a significant accounting error that was managed by a single person in the organization.
Speaker 1:This was only late November.
Speaker 2:Right Now, if you're the best CFO in the world and I heard they have a great CFO they had a great CFO because he had to step down, unfortunately. Cfo they had a great CFO because he had to step down, unfortunately how can you make sure that you have a team of like a thousand people, 500 people? They're all doing their job, all the data is monitored. You can't do that right, and even the people themselves. They can't do that because there was massive amount of data. So the ability to automate allows you not only to save that manual work, but also to avoid the horrible consequences of not you know, not meeting your financial data compliance requirements, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, that's a pretty compelling pitch. Yeah well, that's a pretty compelling pitch. So, looking ahead, can you give us a peek into your roadmap or direction? Product update over the next year or two? What you know, maybe partnerships?
Speaker 2:What might be on the horizon. One of the things we're really excited about is the ability to, in the accounting world because it's a complex world the office of the CFO a lot of time work with partners, advisory, consulting firms that help them set the controls and help them get ready to become public or maintain a public company. We'd like to think that we can arm this ecosystem of advisors and consultants to the office of the CFO with the technology that can really help them, not just to give you a set of controls that then you have to hire a team of 10 people to do manually, but actually automate all the controls that they put in place. So one of the things we're really excited about is the ability to partner with leading advisory firms in the ecosystem in order to allow them not to just give you a grocery list of manual tasks to do every week and every month, but actually arm you with the automation that is tailored exactly to your needs as a company, where you're not only advised on what to do, it's also being done automatically and you get the full solution. So that's one of the things we have on the horizon, on top of, of course, all kinds of features in our platform and so on.
Speaker 2:The other thing is AI. In everything we do there is AI. Ai helps us to mesh the data together for multiple systems, because in the office of the CFO all the data is structured but it's labeled differently in each system. So the ability to mesh it together, we harness the power of AI. Then the AI helps us to be able to understand fluctuations and discrepancies and provide the answer to the customer directly. Then, using AI, we can ask the data questions. You can ask the data questions. Think about all the improvements and efficiencies that can kind of bake into the audit process where, instead of your auditor giving you a large grocery list of questions, he can ask the system himself all these questions and get the answer unsolicited directly from the system, saving a lot of manual work back and forth and so on. So I'd like to think there's like an exciting thing in the horizon helping finance team do more with less, but being more compliant and more eager with the data in the process.
Speaker 1:Amazing. See, we're going to have a virtual accountant and he or she will be an avatar or a robot of some time and you can just chat with it over lunch. What an amazing world we find ourselves in, well thanks so much. Really appreciate the insight and the vision, and never I thought I'd find accounting fascinating, but you've changed my perspective. Really good stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me, ivan. Thanks everyone for listening and watching as well. Take care.