Digits announces AI-powered accounting platform to take on QuickBooks and Xero

Digits is taking on QuickBooks and Xero, with the world’s first AI-powered Autonomous General Ledger, allowing small business owners and accountants to put their accounting needs almost completely in the hands of AI.

Digits announced the service—which went live Monday—at HumanX in Las Vegas, after working on it for the past five years in stealth mode and putting it in the hands of hundreds of companies to test out over the past year. The platform serves as an alternative to other accounting software or platforms, such as QuickBooks or Xero, but stands out as it uses its own proprietary AI technology.

Jeff Seibert, the co-founder and CEO of Digits, says that puts the platform ahead of other competing accounting programs, even those that purport to also utilize AI technology. In many cases, he says, those platforms are simply throwing numbers into broad-based LLMs like ChatGPT, and not purpose-built AI tools, like what Digits has built in-house.

“We went all the way,” Seibert says. “We went heads-down, and spent the past five years creating the first end-to-end accounting platform for the AI era.” And when comparing Digits to key competitors, Seibert says that “we’re feature-competitive, we can do everything that they can do,” but again, “the difference is that we’ve spent five years training our own models,” allowing for automation for “a vast majority of the work.”

So, for accountants or small business owners, using Digits is a matter of connecting the right accounts, and letting the AI take over—it can record and categorize transactions in near-real-time, reconcile accounts, and then create insights and reports. In effect, processes that may take weeks can be winnowed down to minutes.

Interestingly, Seibert says that he hopes Digits can help stymie a larger issue in the accounting field: The lack of accountants. Currently, three-quarters of accountants are near retirement age, and the number of prospective accountants (those taking CPA exams) is the lowest in decades. While there’s already a glut of accounting talent, it’s set to get worse.

“Nobody in Gen Z wants to be an accountant,” Seibert says. As such, he hopes Digits can prove to be a stop-gap of sorts—not replace human accountants entirely, but allow those accountants to do more with less.

Digits has already garnered a good amount of attention from investors, having raised around $100 million in recent years from investors such as Benchmark and SoftBank. And customers seem to be buying in, too, as the group of businesses that spent the past year testing the product are giving it a thumbs-up, according to Seibert.

“We already have hundreds of firms that want to access it,” he says. “It’s magical.”

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