250-person Tokyo firm swaps data entry for client meetings

In Japan, bookkeeping has a factory floor.

Some accounting firms even call it the production department, and the name fits. Someone goes out to the client's office to collect the paperwork. Back at the firm, people sort the receipts, scan them and key them into the accounting software, one slip at a time, until entries come out the other end.

Youngeui Seu runs Seventh Sense Group, a Tokyo accounting group of more than 250 people, and he can tell you what that line costs.

"More than half of what clients pay us each month goes into that whole process."

So Seventh Sense handed the line to AI. No surprise there. The surprise is what the firm did with the time it got back.

Closing the Distance, a six-minute film with Seventh Sense, in Japanese with English subtitles.

Early to AI, on purpose

Seventh Sense is not a firm that waits. It runs 13 offices across Japan and Singapore, works with international companies in several languages, and is a member of PKF Global. The group even built its own generative AI tool for financial due diligence, called AIDD, and patented it.

"We were already using AI a lot," Seu says. By his estimate, Japan has about 30,000 accounting firms, and only a few hundred have built AI into the way they work. He won't tell the rest they're wrong. Some practitioners still prefer to write tax returns by hand, and some have decided AI can wait. He doesn't think anyone can hold back the tide.

"I think within a few years, doing the books or filing a return without AI will become practically impossible. That's why, as AI kept evolving, we wanted to bring tofu in."

How soon? Shuhei Ohno has a date in mind. He's a CPA and tax accountant, and a director at Seventh Sense Tax Corporation. "For me, it's next year. By 2027 the gap between firms will be huge."

Ohno also has a view on why tofu keeps pace. "What impresses me most about tofu is that they have so many excellent engineers and build almost everything in house. I think that's what drives the speed and the accuracy."

Meeting expense or entertainment?

Here is the job tofu does at Seventh Sense. A client's receipt comes in, and before anyone touches it, tofu reads it and makes the call a junior would have to ask about. Is it a meeting expense or client entertainment? In Japan the two get different tax treatment, so the call matters.

"tofu looks at a receipt and figures out on its own whether it's a meeting expense or entertainment. That alone is amazing. It's the same as having a person do it."

When tofu gets one wrong, someone on the team tells it: no, make this one a meeting expense. tofu takes the correction and uses it next time. Yuil Kim, a director who heads the firm's corporate planning office, sees the results.

"You can really feel how strong the learning is. The accuracy just keeps climbing month after month, so you can tell it's genuinely learning."

Kim says the difference from older tools is how it learns. It doesn't copy the last entry it saw. It works out what the transaction means.

"It actually understands the meaning and gives you the right entry. It builds into a kind of knowledge base, and that means even brand-new hires can pick up cases easily."

A first year without the slips

Seventh Sense gave tofu to its youngest people first, and that was deliberate. "We figured tofu would work best if we handed it to the younger staff first, so that's where we started," Ohno says. The less experience people have, he explains, the less they even know what to look for. A new hire can't tell which transaction a senior booked last year, so asking the AI becomes the realistic option.

"If I'd had AI when I was starting out, it would have been amazing."

Rin Tonosaki is one of those new hires, a first-year consultant who expected the classic apprenticeship.

"I figured I'd be checking slips one by one and entering them by hand. With no experience, I assumed that's where I'd have to start. But by the time I joined, tofu was already up and running."

The hours those slips would have eaten went into learning instead. "It was a surprise in the best way," Tonosaki says, "and it made my first year genuinely fun."

Ohno sees a bigger change behind that. Until four or five years ago, the first thing the firm taught a new graduate was how to build financial statements and tax returns. That's changing. The plan now is to hand the bookkeeping, the year-end close and in time even the filing to AI, then take the finished work to clients and build the relationship from there.

tofu keeps what it learns where people can read it, too. Every journal entry it creates adds to a knowledge base, and a manager can load their own judgement into it ahead of time. Ohno sees a second payoff in that.

"On top of that, when people learn from that knowledge base, they can brush up their own skills and knowledge. And if you put how a manager thinks into it ahead of time, less experienced staff can learn the shortest route."

Why the time goes back to clients

Efficiency was never the point at Seventh Sense. It was a way to get somewhere else, and Seu knows where.

"AI frees up more of our time, so we get to spend way more time with business owners. We tell our people: go meet clients as much as you can."

The firm is shifting toward meeting face to face and talking in person. Seu doesn't see that as a nice extra. He sees it as the whole point.

"Otherwise the value people bring just disappears."

That's the idea behind the film's title, Closing the Distance. tofu takes the production work off people's desks, and the people go back out to their clients.

A career people choose

There's one more reason Seventh Sense cares. If AI takes the grind out of year one, accounting can compete for graduates. Seu wants them to weigh an accounting firm the way they weigh a bank or a trading house.

"Maybe their first choice is banking, maybe trading, or maybe they'll consider working at an accounting firm. That's our goal for now."

That goal starts with a receipt no junior has to key in by hand.

Seventh Sense uses tofu for client bookkeeping in Japan. tofu reads invoices, receipts and bank statements, codes every line the way your team would, and learns from each correction. It is trusted by 5,000+ end clients in 100+ countries and used by 7 of the top 10 global accounting networks. Book a demo.