Case Study - AI automation cut human hours by up to 42% across a portfolio of accounting firms.
A private equity firm rolling up accounting practices needed to standardize and streamline operations. Cedar Labs deployed an AI engineer who automated workflows across QuickBooks, tax filing software, and Microsoft Office, reducing human hours on common tasks by 25–42%.
- Client
- Accounting Firm PE Rollup
- Year
- –
- Service
- AI Engineering, Automation
Overview
A private equity firm was executing a roll-up strategy in the accounting space, acquiring small-to-mid-size accounting firms across the country. With each acquisition, they inherited different tools, processes, and levels of technical maturity — but the same recurring manual workflows.
The firm engaged Cedar Labs to embed an AI engineer directly with their operations team. The goal was to identify the most time-consuming repetitive tasks across their portfolio companies and build automations that could be deployed across all of them.
Over six months, the AI engineer worked across the full stack of accounting firm tooling — QuickBooks for bookkeeping, tax form preparation and filing software, Microsoft Office for client communications and reporting, and various enterprise platforms for internal operations.
The automations targeted tasks like client data intake, invoice reconciliation, tax document preparation, report generation, and cross-platform data synchronization. Each automation was designed to slot into existing workflows with minimal disruption to staff.
The result was a 25–42% reduction in human hours for the targeted tasks, with the range depending on the complexity of each firm's existing processes and tooling.
What we did
- AI Workflow Automation
- QuickBooks Integration
- Tax Filing Automation
- Microsoft Office Tooling
- Reduction in Human Hours
- 25–42%
- Engagement Duration
- 6 months
- Enterprise Platforms Automated
- 4+
For privacy reasons, the client requested anonymizing both names and company details in this portfolio profile.