Top 10 AI tools for accountants in 2026

Hey, I'm Isaac from Oster.co, and in this video, I'm going to show you the top 10 AI tools for accountants in 2025 outside of just using ChatGPT. We've worked with over 100 accounting firms over the years, and the tools I share today, I've actually tested or at least heard great things about for that account. I'll be sharing use cases across bookkeeping, process, documentation, meetings, email, and more. I'll also share one alternative app for each category so you have options to compare. Let's start with bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is an area of accounting that can be greatly assisted by AI, and BookAI was one of the first tools to come to the market. It helps you add, reconcile, and categorize transactions based on your historical data. You can connect it to QuickBooks, you can connect it to Xero, and it will go ahead and extract the different information you have. One of the complaints we hear a lot of accountants have is that really rules can only get you so far within QuickBooks and within Xero. And sometimes you have rules for one client that don't really transfer into another. So tools like this, like Booky.ai, are meant to solve that issue by allowing you to learn from either a segment of clients or all your clients, or for that exact client, but their historical data, and be able to take that information and use AI to suggest how to reconcile and categorize that transaction based on how you've coded it in the past. It supports QuickBooks and Xero at the moment, and you can really see it as rules with superpowers. It kind of helps you find potential errors and other things As well as kind of communicate with the client, have a little bit of a portal for them to give you answers when sometimes you just don't have the full context of what you're going to need to categorize that transaction. It can also be helpful when for your use case rules won't work. We are working with a firm actually at the moment from the UK that works with musicians that travel all around the world and literally are buying purchases from different countries every time. So rules really wouldn't work for that scenario. And she explored this tool. For some reason it wasn't enough for her needs. So that's kind of what she decided to work with us, kind of help them custom build something. But hey, it's something that definitely you could explore and see if it would work for you. So the second product in the bookkeeping category, it's Legix.ai. It's a newer product and it currently only supports QuickBooks Online. I had a demo and the opportunity to chat with the founder. So I'm personally very excited about a product like this. They've actually also snagged a couple of bigger firms like Reconcile and Agate that are at least big in the small firm world. There's not a lot of information. Of course, there's a newer firm, but you can request access and I believe they have some sort of trial that you can start to play with. The next category is process documentation, and we're starting here with Scribe. It is a tool that helps you capture your workflows just by tracking user actions. It's a little Chrome extension that you simply get started with and you go ahead, click this button, click this button, and the outcome of that is a very simple and streamlined guide with screenshots and clear instructions of what your team should do to follow that, that process. I like the fact that it actually gives you text plus screenshots rather than a video, cuz a text with images is actually easier to skim and easier to update. How many times have you created a video and maybe your team just watches that video once and really never watches this again cuz they have to like find the exact spot where they, maybe they're stuck. This makes it a lot easier. The next tool is Loom AI. Now this is a video tool, but the cool thing is that those 2 tools can be combined and where you are about to record a process for a team member, you could actually just turn both on and then you'll have a video plus a text plus screenshots for your team to reference later. Loom has been in the market for a long time, and I would assume that many people watching this video are already familiar with it. I do like the fact that now with their AI features, you have like the full transcription the moment you finish. So you can kind of type that in or like find specific words in the video. They give you highlights and timestamps so that you can see what the video is kind of talking about. Potentially skip. That can be helpful for documentation purposes, for people to jump into specific sessions. And they also give you a video summary and a title, which, you know, previously my titles were like Google Chrome, whatever, you know, window I was on. But now they kind of take the context of what you discussed and give you a title suggestion. It's not always perfect, sometimes I tweak it a little bit, but it's much easier to edit than just come up with a The next tool is Notion.ai. The idea here is for you to be able to ask questions, whether about the updates on a project, how to do a specific task, an update on on a client, and it will go in and look through Notion, look through Slack, look through Google Drive, and all the integrations that they have to allow you to give you the answer directly from their interface. And very similarly, Slide.ai does. Very, a very similar thing. I do like that Slite's not trying to be everything for everyone. Notion has grown to be much more than just a knowledge base, although a knowledge base is what it was known for early on. Slite is just trying to hone that specific use case as opposed to trying to be everything for everybody. And it has very similar features in terms of being able to, you know, reference existing documentation or sources, uh, from your process documentation internally on your knowledge base, but also potentially other external tools. They can even have the, the possibility of you creating a Slack channel where people can ask their questions there, and then it will actually go ahead and give you an answer based on the context you have so that you don't have to exit Slack if Slack is what you use in your firm. And overall, I do like when a software company decides, hey, this is our lane We are good at knowledge bases. That's what we're gonna do very well. Cuz I found that sometimes it's easy for a software product like a Notion to become bloated over time. Next thing on our list, it's Fathom. Fathom, it's an AI note taker. There are now plenty of them in the market. This was actually one of the first ones to market, I think back in 2020 or 2021. I love that then, you know, they have the ability for you to create a summary with different templates. Whether it is a sales call, a customer success call, just a generic call that you want, you can give them a structure to create the summary for you, and you can kind of send that information to other places via Zapier. We've done automations like that to dump that into Carbon, dump that into ClickUp, dump that into your project management solution or your CRM as well, like a hotspot. I find it very useful to collaborate across teams so that you can, for example, look at the client meetings that your team members have or the sales call your You know, development representatives had, and then you can very easily see how they're doing. You can even like click on a specific topic and it will guide you through. It will jump you to that section of the video so you can watch what was discussed at that point. Another thing I really like is just this Ask Fathom section that you can go in and say, I do this all the time. Like, what were the action items from this call as an example, or as they are suggesting in this, in their website, like what we discussed, what did we talk about in the last meeting? And it makes you seem like a genius when and you remember everything. I remember I met with a contractor I was considering working with and we had met a year back and he made some comments about what he was doing at the time and brought that up. And again, I think it just helps you look good and appear like a genius when you do that. Fathom's main competitor, it's Fireflies.ai. It offers many of the same features we talked about. Some people do find the interface a little bit more intuitive. I personally like Fathom better. But I've seen a lot of people, you know, raving about Fireflies. Similar to Ask Fathom, they have their Ask Fred that you can just talk to, to ask anything you may want, whether it is, you know, what was discussed in this call, what are the action items I have to do, what are the action items the client or the other person committed to in this call, and you have that very easy answer, the bullet list, and potentially even the timestamp so you can look back and kind of confirm that that's the case. And just a comment on AI note takers. Some people say like, well, why wouldn't I use something like Zoom AI Companion? Or I think Teams have a built-in AI transcriptor of some sort. What I can tell you is that the user experience and the ability to search for, um, with these third-party tools is just much, much better when you compare that to some of the built-in features like the Zoom AI Companion and the Teams version of that. Usually they're good at like just transcribing it and that's about it. So often, more often than not, these tools are kind of worth, uh, worth, worth the cost, worth the investment. On our next category is practice management and email in particular. And here we're going to talk about Carbon AI. Carbon is a practice management system that has been known to have an email triage and have email really built into the platform in a way that makes a lot of sense and that works pretty well. But of course, when you have a thread that's like 25 replies deep, sometimes it can be challenging to really know what was discussed at a glance or even remember what was discussed, even, even if you were part of that conversation. So it helps you summarize that. I believe it also has the ability to potentially prioritize or flag different emails in the inbox based Based on the context that it has. And of course also helps you reply and compose an email based on the context of what was discussed with a simple prompt. Hey, let's reply saying this and that. It will take the context of what was discussed up until that point and help you create a draft for that email as well. Very similarly, and one of its, Carbon's main competitors, is Canopy. And within Canopy AI, you have very similar features. The ability to draft the reply to a specific email, potentially correct the wrong grammar and sort of like proofread that email in that way. I also like that you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of languages as well as tone and style selection, or at least there are some prompts and cards for you to select from as opposed to trying to sometimes some of these AI writing tools try to like look at how you've written in the past and try to get your tone and style from that. But sometimes if you want different tones for different responses, it can be helpful for you to have that ability to make that selection on an individual basis. Now let's be honest, if you don't have your core app figured out, which for us that's your practice management system, finding the latest AI features or AI tools isn't going to help that much. That's why I recently reviewed and rated 25 different practice management systems for accounting firms. So if you're in the market for one or you just want to know how yours stacked up, check out that video. Uh, that's showing up on the screen right now. And with that, I'll see you on the next one. And until then, stay efficient.