How an Accounting Firm Cut Month-End Close Time by Up to 67% with Artifact

The Challenge: Manual Rework and Low Trust in Automation

Before adopting Artifact, the firm relied on a familiar stack: Apron for invoice capture and Xero for posting and reconciliation.

In theory, this setup should have reduced manual work. In practice, it created friction.

Low extraction accuracy and inconsistent supplier and VAT coding meant that staff spent significant time “sense checking” outputs. Errors often surfaced late — during VAT returns or even at year-end — leading to rework, clean-up, and unnecessary stress.

As the practitioner put it:

“I don’t trust Apron… the accuracy is very, very low.”

Common pain points included:

• Rechecking VAT rates and nominal codes in Xero

• Fixing inconsistent supplier names that fragmented coding history

• Manually researching ambiguous merchant descriptions

• Re-training fragile bank rules that broke when formats changed

The result was a close process that didn’t scale and required deep tribal knowledge to avoid downstream issues.

The Solution: Artifact as a Pre-Accounting Automation Layer

The firm introduced Artifact to sit in front of Xero, acting as an intelligent pre-accounting layer.

Artifact ingests documents and transactions, extracts context, proposes parties and VAT/nominal treatments, and allows bulk validation before exporting clean, auditable outputs directly into Xero.

Instead of correcting errors after the fact, the team could validate and fix issues upstream — at scale.

Key changes included:

• Context-aware coding based on documents and transactions

• Bulk review and posting instead of one-by-one reconciliation

• Better handling of edge cases and client-specific patterns

• Reduced need for manual research and guesswork

The Impact: Faster Close, Less Rework, More Capacity

The results were immediate.

For one client’s month-end close, total time dropped from approximately 3 hours to around 1 hour, a 67% reduction in close time

As more clients were onboarded and the system learned from prior validations, the practitioner estimated steady-state savings of 55–60%, with the potential to reach 70–80% over time.

Operationally, this meant:

• Fewer corrections during VAT returns and year-end work

• More consistent coding and cleaner reporting

• A close process that scaled across clients and complexity

Quantifying the ROI

Looking across three representative workloads — including higher-volume and more complex clients — the firm estimated total time savings of 14 hours per month, or 168 hours per year

When monetized at typical fully loaded accounting costs, that translated into:

• £5,880/year at £35/hour

• £8,400/year at £50/hour

• £12,600/year at £75/hour

In practical terms, this represented weeks of capacity released each year, allowing the firm to take on more work without adding headcount.

As one practitioner summarized:

“[With Artifact] it’s an hour or less… that’s like 66% time savings.”

Why It Matters

This case highlights a key shift in accounting automation.

Traditional tools record transactions. Artifact automates the work around them — reducing rework, improving trust in outputs, and making close processes scalable and predictable.

For accounting firms, that means faster closes, cleaner data, and more time spent on higher-value work instead of corrections.

About This Case Study

This story is based on an anonymized customer interview conducted in January 2026. Time savings combine measured examples and practitioner estimates and should be validated through side-by-side testing.