Pilot touts Meridian, says AI comparable to seasoned accountant – Accounting Today

Bookkeeping, tax and outsourced CFO services company Pilot announced the launch of Meridian, which is said to be able to perform the full scope of bookkeeping and financial reporting. 
Meridian does so by applying Pilot’s operational knowledge gained from many years of performing bookkeeping for thousands of businesses in order to deliver review-ready financials, reportedly with the skill of a seasoned staff accountant. It is designed to  run as infrastructure beneath a firm’s existing team, handling repetitive close work that previously required increasing headcount to scale. 
“Three out of four accounting firms are turning away clients they don’t have the capacity to serve,” said Jessica McKellar, founder and CEO of Pilot, in a statement. “You can’t hire your way out of that. We built Meridian to solve it, and we ran it on our own books for years before we ever put it in front of a firm.”
The solution can automate onboarding, transaction processing, reconciliation and real-time financial reporting. The AI Accountant applies contextual decision-making to handle complex or unusual cases, in a manner similar to a senior accountant. It runs through built-in controls and validation gates, including reconciliation tie-outs, invoice clearing, depreciation and a checklist of close controls developed across years of production work. Every transaction and decision is logged, providing transaction-level visibility and guardrails, for firms to review and approve or step in as needed. The autonomous personal close process supports both cash- and accrual-basis customers. The solution itself will connect with banks, payroll, billing and other financial platforms.
“I run a client portfolio on Meridian myself, managing $500,000 in revenue, to stay close to the product, ” McKellar said. “If I can do that on the side after my kids go to bed, a firm’s full-time accountants can do far more.”
The announcement, made at the Scaling New Heights conference in Orlando, was made just four months after Pilot announced the release of its AI bookkeeper (see previous story), touted as a full virtual worker that can autonomously run the entire bookkeeping and financial reporting process end to end with zero need for human intervention.  
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