Autonomous Accounting: Building the World’s First Self-Running Financial Agents
How Fiskl is pioneering autonomous accounting through agentic AI systems that will transform how 450 million SMEs manage finances
By Shawn Vader, CTO and Co-Founder, Fiskl
Shawn Vader is the CTO and Co-Founder of Fiskl, bringing over 15 years of experience from senior engineering roles at HSBC Global Banking & Markets, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Dresdner Kleinwort. A seasoned software architect specializing in financial systems, he leads Fiskl’s technical vision for autonomous accounting.
Autonomous accounting isn’t a future concept—it’s what we’re building right now at Fiskl. While others add chatbots to legacy software, we’re engineering autonomous accounting agents that will handle entire financial workflows independently, from transaction categorization to tax compliance, without human intervention.
Our foundation is proven: we’ve already automated 60% of traditional accounting work, processing over 500 million transactions across 42,580 businesses in 207 countries. But that’s just the beginning. We’re now building the agentic accounting systems that will achieve 95% autonomy—completely self-running financial operations that give small business owners their time back.
This is the definitive moment for autonomous accounting. The convergence of advanced AI models, production-ready agent frameworks, and our deep financial engineering expertise means we can finally build what was impossible just two years ago: accounting that runs itself.
Defining Autonomous Accounting: Beyond Automation to True Autonomy
Autonomous accounting represents a fundamental shift from AI-assisted to AI-driven financial operations. It’s the difference between a calculator and a mathematician, between cruise control and self-driving.
Traditional accounting automation handles discrete tasks: categorizing transactions, matching receipts, generating reports. Autonomous accounting goes further—it understands context, makes decisions, handles exceptions, and completes entire workflows without human intervention. When we achieve full autonomous accounting, a business owner will simply connect their financial accounts and never need to think about bookkeeping, compliance, or reporting again.
Agentic accounting systems don’t just process—they think. They understand that a Stripe charge might relate to a Shopify order, that a supplier payment needs matching to multiple invoices, that seasonal variations affect cash flow projections. This isn’t rule-based automation; it’s intelligent agents that understand the business holistically.
At Fiskl, we’re building three types of autonomous accounting agents:
- Reconciliation Agents that understand money movement across multiple platforms
- Compliance Agents that navigate tax requirements across jurisdictions
- Intelligence Agents that provide CFO-level insights and recommendations
These agents will work together in what we call an autonomous accounting ecosystem—a self-organizing system that handles financial complexity automatically.
Why Autonomous Accounting Requires Agentic AI Architecture
Building autonomous accounting isn’t just about applying AI to existing workflows. It requires fundamental architectural innovation that we’re pioneering at Fiskl.
Multi-Ledger Reality: Modern businesses operate across 7-12 different financial platforms simultaneously. Autonomous accounting agents must understand how money flows between Stripe subscriptions, Shopify sales, PayPal transfers, bank accounts, and cryptocurrency wallets. Each has different timing, fees, and data structures. Our agentic accounting architecture handles this complexity natively.
Long-Running Workflows: Autonomous accounting must handle workflows that run for hours or days. Month-end closing isn’t a query—it’s a complex process touching dozens of systems. Our agents maintain context across extended sessions, making thousands of micro-decisions while working toward workflow completion.
Zero-Error Tolerance: In autonomous accounting, accuracy isn’t negotiable. We’re building deterministic systems within probabilistic frameworks—agents that leverage AI’s pattern recognition while guaranteeing consistent, auditable results.
Global Complexity: Agentic accounting must handle 170+ currencies, tax rules for 207 countries, and compliance requirements that change constantly. Our autonomous agents don’t just follow rules—they understand principles and adapt to new requirements automatically.
The Current Foundation: 60% Automation Proving Autonomous Accounting Viability
While full autonomous accounting is under development, our current platform proves the viability with 60% automation across core workflows:
Intelligent Categorization: Our AI categorizes transactions with 98% accuracy, learning from patterns across millions of data points. This isn’t simple matching—it understands context, handles edge cases, and improves continuously.
Multi-Currency Intelligence: Real-time handling of 170+ currencies with automatic conversion and revaluation. The foundation for autonomous accounting that operates globally without human intervention.
Document Processing: Multimodal AI extracts data from any invoice, receipt, or statement format, preparing for autonomous agents that will handle document workflows end-to-end.
This foundation processes 500 million transactions annually, proving that agentic accounting can operate at scale. Every transaction teaches our systems, building the intelligence necessary for full autonomy.
Engineering Autonomous Accounting Agents: Our Technical Approach
Building autonomous accounting agents requires solving challenges that don’t exist in traditional software development. Here’s how we’re approaching it:
Agent Memory Architecture
Autonomous accounting requires agents with sophisticated memory capabilities. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Memory provides exactly what we need: short-term memory for maintaining context within workflows and long-term memory for building institutional knowledge. This isn’t just about context windows—it’s about agents that truly learn.
Short-term memory maintains workflow state—remembering which transactions have been processed, which suppliers have been paid, which tax filings are pending. Long-term memory, with its $0.75 per 1,000 memories stored, builds knowledge over time—learning customer patterns, seasonal variations, and business-specific rules.
This dual-memory architecture, combined with Anthropic Claude’s advanced reasoning through Amazon Bedrock, is crucial for agentic accounting. Without it, agents would treat every transaction as new. With it, they become increasingly intelligent, understanding each business’s unique patterns and requirements.
Collaborative Agent Orchestration
Our autonomous accounting agents don’t work in isolation—they collaborate. Using frameworks like Strands Agents SDK and AgentCore’s multi-agent capabilities, agents coordinate seamlessly. When the Reconciliation Agent encounters an unusual pattern, it consults with the Compliance Agent to understand tax implications and the Intelligence Agent to assess business impact.
This collaborative approach to agentic accounting leverages Model Context Protocol (MCP) for standardized agent communication, enabling perfect information sharing with no delays. Agents can spawn sub-agents for specific tasks, coordinate across domains, and synthesize multiple perspectives into optimal decisions—capabilities that became production-ready with AgentCore’s preview release in July 2025.
Deterministic Reasoning Framework
Autonomous accounting must be explainable and auditable. Every decision made by our agents includes clear reasoning that can be reviewed by humans. This isn’t just for compliance—it’s for trust.
We’re building what we call “glass box” agentic accounting—systems where the reasoning is transparent, the logic is traceable, and the outcomes are predictable. Business owners need to understand not just what their autonomous accounting agents did, but why.
The Path to 95% Autonomous Accounting: What We’re Building
Our roadmap to full autonomous accounting focuses on three breakthrough capabilities launching over the next 12 months:
Phase 1: Self-Reconciling Accounts (Q4 2025)
Autonomous agents built on AgentCore Runtime will handle multi-ledger reconciliation without human intervention. Leveraging Nova Pro’s 300K token context, these agents understand timing differences, fee structures, and partial payments across all platforms a business uses. They’ll identify and resolve discrepancies automatically, only escalating true anomalies.
Phase 2: Autonomous Compliance (Q4 2025)
Agentic accounting powered by AgentCore Browser Tool will handle tax compliance end-to-end. These agents will navigate government portals, submit filings, and manage compliance across jurisdictions. With AgentCore Code Interpreter, they’ll perform complex tax calculations with perfect accuracy.
Phase 3: Predictive Financial Intelligence (Q1 2026)
Autonomous accounting agents using Amazon Nova Premier (when available) will provide CFO-level insights. With its million-token context window and advanced reasoning, Nova Premier will enable agents that forecast cash flow, identify optimization opportunities, and provide strategic recommendations that rival human financial advisors.
By end of 2025, these capabilities will combine into truly autonomous accounting—financial operations that run themselves with minimal human oversight.
Why Legacy Platforms Cannot Achieve Autonomous Accounting
QuickBooks and Xero face insurmountable challenges in building autonomous accounting. Their architectural constraints make true agentic accounting impossible without complete platform rebuilds:
Single-Ledger Architecture: Built for a simpler era, they can’t handle modern multi-platform complexity without fundamental reconstruction. Adding AI features doesn’t change this limitation.
Platform Evolution Paralysis: With millions of users on legacy code, major changes take 18-36 months to deploy. By the time they’ve added basic AI, we’ll have achieved full autonomous accounting.
Bolt-On vs. Built-In: They’re adding AI features peripherally while we’re building agentic accounting into our core architecture. It’s the difference between a car with driver assistance and one designed for full autonomy.
This creates a unique window for autonomous accounting innovation. While incumbents struggle with technical debt, we’re building the future from first principles.
The Infrastructure Requirements for Autonomous Accounting
Building production-ready autonomous accounting agents requires infrastructure capabilities that have only recently become available. The convergence of new AI services and frameworks in 2024-2025 has finally made autonomous accounting technically and economically feasible.
Extended Session Persistence: Financial workflows require agents that maintain context for 8+ hours. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime provides exactly this capability—supporting agent sessions up to 8 hours with complete isolation, enabling month-end closing workflows that traditional AI infrastructure cannot handle.
Multi-Model Orchestration: Agentic accounting leverages different models for different tasks. Amazon Nova models provide the perfect tier system: Nova Micro ($0.035/million tokens) for lightning-fast categorization, Nova Lite for multimodal document processing, and Nova Pro for complex financial analysis with 300K token context windows. This 75% cost reduction compared to alternatives makes autonomous accounting economically viable.
Agent Memory and Learning: AgentCore Memory enables both short-term memory for workflow context and long-term memory for learning customer patterns—essential for autonomous agents that improve over time. Combined with AgentCore Gateway for tool integration, our agents can access banking APIs, payment processors, and financial systems securely.
Enterprise-Grade Security: Autonomous accounting handles sensitive financial data requiring bank-level security. AgentCore Identity provides OAuth-based authentication for agents to act on behalf of users, while Amazon Bedrock Guardrails ensure compliance and prevent hallucinations in financial calculations.
Global Low-Latency: With customers in 207 countries, our autonomous agents must deliver consistent performance worldwide. Cross-region inference and edge deployment capabilities ensure millisecond response times globally.
Production Observability: AgentCore Observability provides real-time monitoring and debugging of agent behavior—crucial for maintaining 99.99% accuracy in financial operations. Every decision is traceable and auditable.
Building Trust in Autonomous Accounting Systems
The greatest challenge in autonomous accounting isn’t technical—it’s trust. We’re addressing this through deliberate design choices:
Graduated Autonomy: Businesses can start with agentic accounting handling simple categorization, then enable reconciliation, and gradually embrace full autonomy as trust builds.
Explainable Decisions: Every action taken by autonomous accounting agents includes clear reasoning. Business owners understand not just what was done but why.
Human Override Options: While building toward full autonomy, we maintain human-in-the-loop options for businesses wanting additional control.
Audit Trail Integrity: Complete, immutable logs of every agent decision, enabling review by business owners, accountants, or auditors.
The Global Impact of Autonomous Accounting
Autonomous accounting will transform how 450 million SMEs operate globally:
Time Liberation: Freeing 120 hours annually per business—54 billion hours globally—for growth and innovation instead of bookkeeping.
Democratized Intelligence: Every business gains CFO-level financial insights regardless of size or location through agentic accounting.
Global Commerce Enablement: Autonomous agents handling multi-currency complexity and international compliance makes global expansion accessible to any business.
Economic Development: In emerging markets where accounting expertise is scarce, autonomous accounting provides critical financial infrastructure for growth.
The Broader Revolution: Autonomous Accounting as the Blueprint
What we’re proving with autonomous accounting extends beyond financial operations. The patterns we’re developing—specialized agents, persistent memory, collaborative orchestration—apply wherever complex business workflows exist.
Agentic accounting is the perfect proving ground: complex enough to be challenging, critical enough to demand reliability, universal enough to drive massive impact. As we pioneer autonomous accounting, we’re creating the blueprint for autonomous business operations across all domains.
Join Us in Building the Autonomous Accounting Revolution
The transition to autonomous accounting represents the most significant shift in financial operations since double-entry bookkeeping. At Fiskl, we’re not just imagining this future—we’re building it.
We’re seeking partners who share our vision for agentic accounting and understand the transformative potential of autonomous agents in financial operations. Whether you’re an enterprise looking to leverage autonomous accounting, a developer wanting to build on our platform, or an organization with infrastructure that can accelerate our mission—the opportunity to shape this revolution is now.
The future of accounting is autonomous. The technology is here. The market is ready.
Let’s build autonomous accounting together.
To learn more about autonomous accounting or explore partnership opportunities, visit fiskl.comor connect with Shawn Vader on LinkedIn.
For technical insights on building agentic AI systems, explore Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Nova models, and the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center.
About the Author: Shawn Vader is the CTO and Co-Founder of Fiskl AI Accounting, where he leads the development of the world’s first autonomous accounting platform. With over 15 years of experience in financial technology at institutions including HSBC Global Banking & Markets, JP Morgan, and Royal Bank of Scotland, he specializes in building enterprise-scale financial systems. At Fiskl, he’s pioneering agentic accounting systems that will enable complete financial automation for businesses globally.
