I Don't Want to Spend Less Time Being an Accountant

I don't want to spend less time being an accountant. I want to spend less time on everything that keeps me from being one.

The balance quietly reversed

Early in my career, roughly 30% of my working hours went to internal office tasks. The other 70% went to clients, meetings, relationships, and building the practice. Over the years that balance flipped. Now it can feel like 80, even 90 percent of the week goes into managing the work itself:

• regulations and reporting requirements
• software logins and technical issues
• the endless challenge of finding and training good people

Even client contact changed. Zoom made communication easier, but in-person meetings became rarer. We have more tools than ever, and somehow less time for what matters most.

The part I still love

And yet I still genuinely enjoy being an accountant. Understanding a business, untangling a problem, helping a client move forward. That is the job I signed up for. What I don't love is the pile of administrative work that sits between me and it.

Why this moment is different

Every previous wave of software made the same old processes a bit faster. What's changing now is the layer of work agentic systems can absorb entirely: categorizing transactions, reconciling accounts, chasing missing documents, closing the month. Not a faster checklist — fewer items on the checklist. The judgment work goes back to humans, where it belongs.

Imagine spending less time managing documents, systems and routine tasks, and more time actually working with clients. More conversations. More opportunities. More room to grow the practice.

How we're building this at Portali

I'm not looking for technology to replace professional judgment or personal relationships. I'm looking for technology that gives us more time to use both.

That's exactly what we're building at Portali: connect your books once, then run reconciliation, reporting and month-end conversationally through ChatGPT via MCP, with you staying in control of every judgment call.

The future of accounting isn't about doing more work with fewer resources. It's about having more time to do the work that really matters.