What is the biggest bottleneck in AI-assisted bookkeeping workflows, and how was it addressed?

The main bottleneck identified was managing raw incoming client documents — duplicate bank statement uploads, unreadable JPEGs instead of proper PDFs, and 'shoebox' style receipt dumps. To address this, the speaker's team built their own app, a 'smart ledger' tool that ingests raw PDF and image files (hundreds at a time) and automatically categorizes and posts them to create a general ledger. Over about 12 months of development, this has reduced client cleanup work that used to take about 10 business days down to about 1 hour, allowing same-day financials even for clients 24 months behind on their books. It reportedly saves staff many hours per week.