Deep Dive on Silverfin AI Assistant

In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how Silverfin helps firms increase operational efficiency, drive revenue growth, and stay compliant – while maintaining high-quality service with less effort using Silverfin AI Assistant.

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Morning, folks. Hopefully, you can all hear me fine. Just give it a minute or so to let people trickle in and join us. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. I’ll give it another thirty seconds or so just to let the numbers creep up, and then we’ll get underway with things. Grant, we’ll get going. Folks can join halfway through or a little bit into if they need to. We will, of course, record this. So anybody that didn’t manage to join on time, you’re going to get a full copy of things as we go through it.

Today is the sixth in our series of deep dive webinars where we focus on a particular element of Silverfin, and today is all about Silverfin Assistant. My name is Mark. I’m one of the senior sales execs here at Silverfin. I’ll do a bit of an introduction to the platform, a bit of background about who Silverfin is, what we do, and where we come from. I’m also joined by Hannah from our CS team. Hannah’s a senior customer success manager. She’s not feeling 100% today, so we’ve prerecorded the demonstration part, but there will be a Q&A at the end. If you guys ask any questions and I can’t answer them, Hannah will be here on hand to get answers to us and run through them. I should spend about five minutes on the slides, and then the demo part runs about ten minutes, and that should leave us with a nice five-minute segment at the end to go over any questions that there might be.

The State of Compliance Technology in Accounting

I always start off these webinars and presentations with a bold statement around what we believe is going on at the minute as far as tech is concerned in accounting firms. The compliance software and technology that you use is outdated. Most of it’s based on tech that’s twenty or thirty years old, and it’s limiting your firm’s potential to grow, acquire new clients, offer new services, and be more efficient. These are all things that make it harder to be a standout firm these days if we don’t address them head on.

The layout of your tech is often old-fashioned, outdated, not connected, disjointed, and siloed. Much of this is on-premises as well, so you’re not using the latest cloud technology. That all has a detrimental impact on how you can service your clients’ requirements through your tech stack.

Even when cloud solutions are introduced, such as Xero and QuickBooks, they often don’t talk to each other. You’ve got better solutions in place that bring some efficiency and improvements, but they don’t all join up. That’s where Silverfin steps in.

What Silverfin Offers

Silverfin is a best-in-breed solution for your compliance requirements: working papers, accounts production, corporation tax, and client management reporting. We add a healthy dose of AI to help streamline that even further. Where we don’t offer solutions for general bookkeeping or practice management, we link out to those other third-party solutions with an open API for integration. We’re super focused on this part, and where we need to call in expertise from other systems, we can do that through our open API.

How Silverfin Works

Think of things flowing from left to right. We’re powered by your client bookkeeping data and are agnostic in terms of where that comes from. If you’ve got clients on cloud systems, we have a live sync that pulls that client data through. If your clients are still on manual records, we can ingest that data via CSV import using trial balance and general ledger data. If you have on-premises systems, as long as they can output CSV, we can take it into Silverfin.

The first thing we do is convert that client data from whatever chart of account is in use to a standardized Silverfin chart of accounts. This means all your client data is in the Silverfin platform in one format. This allows us to work with that client data in standardized workflows, regardless of where the data’s come from. All your team can work in a unified way. We also have a database of client data that’s instantly referenceable and searchable for trends and benchmarks, as it’s all in one format.

On the workflow side, the main traditional workflows we cover in Silverfin are:

• ​Working papers
• ​Accounts production
• ​Corporation tax
• ​Management reporting

These workflows are interconnected, so relevant data flows forwards and backwards between sections. For example, data from year-end prep in working papers prepopulates accounts production, and corporation tax figures flow through automatically. You touch the data once but have multiple outputs. Monthly or quarterly reporting work also flows up into your annual job, saving time by not handling data more than once.

Our API allows you to submit accounts and tax to relevant governing bodies and talk to third-party solutions like practice management and further reporting. All our documentation is available online.

We also have a client portal called Pulse, which allows you to share documentation with clients, receive documents, e-sign, ask questions, set tasks, queries, and share reports—all within the portal.

AI in Silverfin

AI is not new to us. We bought an AI development company about five years ago and had been working with them previously. Our AI features are woven into Silverfin, not just added on as a recent tool. For example, AI automates the remapping of client data input to our standard chart of accounts, assists with the push and pull of client data to different workflows, raises red flags for missing disclosure notes, and checks the quality of client bookkeeping data for anomalies.

The whole idea of our AI is to increase your capacity, save time, and be reactive rather than proactive, as we’re working on live sets of client data. This allows you to deliver value to the client sooner.

Review and Collaboration

The review aspect of Silverfin allows for a structured, robust, and tailored way of reviewing client work, ensuring it’s done properly by preparers, reviewed by reviewers, and signed off by partners and directors—all in a standardized way. The collaboration piece ensures anyone in the firm can pick up the client file and have all the context, notes, and review points available, regardless of their location.

Customer Results

Here are three examples from our customers:

• ​BKL: Able to halve the time it takes to prepare and submit a year-end accounts job.
• ​Hearst: Increased revenues by £200k by offering additional services, thanks to more capacity.
• ​PKF Francis Clark: Increased the amount of reviews conducted, ensuring high-quality work and client satisfaction.

These examples show how Silverfin unlocks capacity, whether through time savings, revenue generation, or improved quality.

We work with a broad range of firms, from large firms with multiple offices to small firms like CCA near Brighton with less than ten staff. Silverfin helps standardize approaches for large, spread-out firms and enables growth for smaller firms through efficient workflows.

Silverfin by the Numbers

• ​Over 1,000 accounting firms use Silverfin
• ​36 of the UK’s top 100 firms
• ​400,000+ client files processed
• ​Presence in 17 countries
• ​180+ employees
• ​12 years in business

Silverfin Assistant Demo

Silverfin Assistant is available across all Silverfin workflows, using AI and machine learning to look for changes in patterns or expectations, helping you identify potential anomalies in your client data and reduce the risk of human error. The assistant analyses client files, highlighting missing transactions, unusual balances, or potential advisory opportunities. It’s up to you to decide which points require further action.

You can access Silverfin Assistant from the assistant tab at the top of your client overview or within your workflow. It also displays checks within templates, indicated by a red dot above the assistant icon in the communication tab.

In the Silverfin Assistant dashboard, you can review all unread checks flagged by Silverfin. Checks can be marked as read or unread. Within each check, you can open it in context, review it, and then navigate back. You can also view all checks, sorted by workflow and template.

Silverfin Assistant runs compliance checks across your data, such as:

• ​Section 455 issues
• ​VAT schemes and thresholds
• ​Illegal dividends
• ​Incorporation tests for sole traders

Completeness checks notify users if related accounts are missing, such as fixed asset registers without depreciation or stock on the balance sheet without purchases in the P&L. There are also general checks, like engagement letter renewals and ratio analysis. A full list of checks is available for your firm.

Silverfin Assistant can extract information from PDFs and automatically input it into templates (bank loans, hire purchase, VAT returns). A purple banner appears in the template for uploading documents. You can select multiple documents, and extracted information is highlighted in purple. You can hover over values to see corresponding data in the PDF and accept changes. This feature currently works on VAT closing balance reconciliation, bank loans, and hire purchase account templates, with plans to expand to payroll and leases templates.

You can upload multiple templates at once (PDF format, max 15 pages, 20MB per document). In some templates, the banner only shows if there’s no data yet. To re-upload a PDF, remove the content from the template first.

Silverfin Assistant also includes actionable checks, such as:

• ​Warning if the default template has been changed from the firm default
• ​Prompting to copy data from prior periods
• ​Appending accrual and prepayment transactions into the template

If you have suggestions for Silverfin Assistant, you can provide feedback through your champions. For additional support, refer to our support pages or Silverfin Academy.

Q&A

Q: How long does it take to implement Silverfin Assistant into a firm’s workflow, and what are the typical onboarding steps?

A: Implementation is pretty much instantaneous. It’s a module that can be turned on, and it will start analyzing and doing checks on client data automatically. Full training is provided, but it works straight away. The broader onboarding program is a 90-day process (can be shorter or longer as needed), covering training, configuration, environment setup, and high-touch support. You’re assigned a dedicated customer success manager who acts as your project manager. The most important part is process mapping, where you apply best practices and document your firm’s preferred way of using Silverfin. This results in a guide for new staff or teams.

If you have further questions or need support, you can get in touch with Silverfin via email or through the website. Recordings of this and previous webinars are available on demand.

Thanks for joining, and we hope to hear from you soon.