Armanino builds AI-powered accounting tools with Claude

Armanino, one of the largest accounting firms in the United States, uses Claude on Amazon Bedrock to transform its accounting and consulting services with AI. By integrating AI into its workflows, Armanino is significantly reducing manual tasks, improving client communication, and accelerating innovation across its audit, tax, and consulting practices. These improvements have allowed Armanino to deliver faster and spend more time on high valued items that benefit their clients. Some of these benefits include estimated time savings in audits such as:

• 65% reduction in time spent on manual writing tasks
• 60% decrease in follow-up clarifications needed
• 2 weeks from idea to production for new AI-powered tools

Revolutionizing accounting with AI

Armanino helps organizations solve their most complex audit, tax, and consulting challenges. Traditionally in the industry, these services have been highly manual, often leaving clients with limited visibility into the process. AJ Yawn, Partner in Charge for Product and Innovation at Armanino, is spearheading an initiative to change this paradigm.

"We want to lead the industry on adopting AI for critical accounting workflows," shares AJ. His team of software engineers is building a platform that will put AI capabilities at the fingertips of everyone at the firm, from auditors to consultants.

Rapid innovation with Claude and Amazon Bedrock

To support its ambitious AI goals, Armanino chose Claude on Amazon Bedrock. The firm had already built its modern server-less architecture on AWS, making Bedrock a natural fit for deploying AI applications.

"Claude immediately stood out when we were looking at all of the models available on Bedrock," AJ explains. "The models in the Claude 3 model family felt like the first AI models that allow you to communicate like a human."

Maliq Lawrence, Product Manager at Armanino, led a formal evaluation of the models available on Bedrock. "Many of the other LLMs we’ve evaluated produce responses that are too robotic for our use cases—and would not meet our expectations for using in customer-facing workflows," Maliq notes. "Claude is different, it provides a really personalized feel."

The product and engineering team found Claude easy to use, allowing them to quickly build, test, and deploy new capabilities. Their first AI-powered product, a tool for auditors to request documents from clients, took just two weeks to go from idea to live production.

"It's insane how easy it is to power very complex use cases with Claude," AJ adds.

Streamlining audits and improving client communication

Armanino's new AI-powered request tool streamlines a process that historically consumed significant time and caused stress for both auditors and clients.

Previously, when clients sent incorrect documents, auditors had to manually write rejection emails, often requiring senior auditor review. This process took 10-15 minutes per rejected item, with 50-75 items typically rejected per audit. Multiplied across thousands of audits each year, this represented a substantial time sink and source of frustration.

The new tool leverages Claude to automatically generate formal notes explaining why a document is incorrect and providing detailed guidance for clients. "We needed this Claude-powered experience to act like a seasoned auditor," AJ explains.

"We're able to provide Claude a small prompt and it gives us a really nice personalized text, about three to four sentences, that delivers exactly what we need from the client in order to fulfill this request," Maliq adds.

Significant time savings and improved confidence

Even with their first Claude-powered use case, the team was able to generate substantial value across the organization, the expected benefits are:

• 65% reduction in time spent writing rejection notes
• 60% decrease in the need for follow-up clarifications
• Thousands of hours saved across the firm annually
• 90% of users report feeling more confident when using the AI-assisted feature

“When we demoed our Claude-powered document request explainer, you could see the users’ eyes immediately light up,” AJ recalls. “We received glowing feedback. We were even told that the feature would change our users’ lives.”

Looking to the future

Armanino's AI lab is already at work on new features to support testing and documentation workflows. "This is really just the start for us," says AJ.

With its innovative use of Claude and focus on solving real-world problems for both staff and clients, Armanino is well-positioned to lead the accounting industry into the AI-powered future.

We evaluated every foundation model available on Amazon Bedrock. Claude is the consistent top-performer. It hallucinates a lot less, and the quality of the output is significantly better than any other model we’ve evaluated. It’s simply night and day.

— AJ Yawn, Partner in Charge, Product & Innovation, Armanino LLP