Accounting needs clean data to work effectively with artificial intelligence, according to AIBM’s co-founders. They explain that AI in accounting depends on clean data, not model power, and that founders should track certain key indicators to ensure their businesses run smoothly.
Artificial intelligence promises to transform how founders manage their businesses, but AIBM’s leadership warns that messy, scattered data will blunt even the most powerful models. Ahead of the shift to structured e-invoicing, they outline what founders should watch, and why finance is becoming a strategic function, not just a compliance one.
AI is set to become a major management accelerator for entrepreneurs, but it quickly runs into a structural limit: it needs quality, well-organized data to be usable. AIBM co-founders Gaëtane Meilleur and Bertrand Leyder note that “feed AI messy data, and the output will be unusable,” no matter how powerful the underlying model is.
They say we’re at a turning point. Today, AI use is mostly about large language models, but the next stage will be agents: systems capable of executing tasks themselves and interacting directly with one another. That shift will significantly speed up business exchanges, but it also makes data quality and governance even more critical.
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The most common mistake among startups and SMEs is data duplication, where information gets entered into invoicing software, copied into a spreadsheet, then reworked again in a second tracking file. Every extra step increases the risk of error, and eventually nobody knows which version is the reference.
AIBM co-founders emphasize the importance of having “one single source of truth, from which dashboards are built.” They also note that founders’ limited familiarity with the operational and fiscal side of finance can raise concrete issues, such as whether VAT should be paid on receipt of a supplier invoice.
Being a next-generation accounting firm means working with the most modern tools available, such as Odoo, and staying realistic about how automated accounting actually is today. Many assume it’s already fully automated, but firms still receive large volumes of invoices and receipts as photos or scans.
Structured e-invoicing will be the real turning point.
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A company with clean, structured, up-to-date accounting doesn’t just hold a compliance tool, but a valuable asset of operational data, provided it knows how to put it to work. Accounting data covers cash flow, margins by product or client, invoicing patterns, and payment behavior, and it becomes strategic once cross-referenced with other sources, such as internet services.
AIBM co-founders recommend that every CEO track three financial indicators regularly: actual available cash, accounts receivable, and margin rather than revenue alone. These indicators should be paired with regular monitoring of expenses to assess the real-time situation and anticipate issues.
A clear path to profitability must be defined from day one, and the finance function will grow in strategic importance, comparing scenarios, anticipating cash needs, and arbitrating between options based on profitability. As AI continues to transform the accounting profession, firms like AIBM are positioned to support entrepreneurs across every dimension of their business and personal wealth.
