Oct 9, 2026 · 30 min · 14 segments
AI-native ledgers are the latest arrivals on the accounting software catwalk, promising to rebuild the general ledger around artificial intelligence. But what’s actually different, and is the…
One term really stands out on the accounting, the autumn accounting software catwalk this year, and that is the AI native ledger.
Damon? First of all, can you run us through what an AI native ledger actually is? It's a ledger that's
I mean, yeah, it is a bit of a made-up term, isn't it? And so if you think about the central heart of accounting, it's the double-entry general ledger.
Debits and credits, the foundational tool that Luca Pacioli invented however many thousand years ago.
And if you look at like where we're at today, we have the big general ledgers, Xero, Sage, QuickBooks, and others.
And the AI native general ledgers are ledgers that have been built in the AI era.
So they are at the heart of it, still deterministic, canonical data sets of a business's financial records and information, but they also, the infrastructure and the data system that was designed around that underlying piece of kit has been built to be used by agents, built to be used by AI agents, both AI that's been created by that company in its own software and through an MCP, which is being able to serve the information from that general ledger up to tools like Chord or ChatGBT so that they can consume the information and do work.
So that's how I best describe what an AI native general editor is versus traditional.
And when we were talking about this earlier, you mentioned like a test or a dividing line that you've got.
Yeah, I mean, as I said, it's like software, and I think about incumbent software, and I can't believe I'm saying Xero is an incumbent.
It felt like only yesterday, Tom, when we were the disruptor, displacing Sage, you know, and taking on MYOB and others.
It is an incumbent in that it wasn't built in the era that the frontier models existed, that code was a thing.
It was built in an era where the primary user of the system to do the counting was a human.
And the AI native ledgers are built in a world where, frankly, you still have to have that because like, you know, so much of the actual work that gets done gets done by humans, but increasingly that work is being done by agents.
But you can optimize that work by building the right underlying infrastructure.
So I look at companies like Digits in the US or Briefcase now, New News in the UK, who had been born in that AI era versus companies like Xero's Sage and QuickBooks that are bolting on AI into their existing product.
One term really stands out on the accounting, the autumn accounting software catwalk this year, and that is the AI native ledger.
Damon? First of all, can you run us through what an AI native ledger actually is? It's a ledger that's
I mean, yeah, it is a bit of a made-up term, isn't it? And so if you think about the central heart of accounting, it's the double-entry general ledger.
Debits and credits, the foundational tool that Luca Pacioli invented however many thousand years ago.
And if you look at like where we're at today, we have the big general ledgers, Xero, Sage, QuickBooks, and others.
And the AI native general ledgers are ledgers that have been built in the AI era.
So they are at the heart of it, still deterministic, canonical data sets of a business's financial records and information, but they also, the infrastructure and the data system that was designed around that underlying piece of kit has been built to be used by agents, built to be used by AI agents, both AI that's been created by that company in its own software and through an MCP, which is being able to serve the information from that general ledger up to tools like Chord or ChatGBT so that they can consume the information and do work.
So that's how I best describe what an AI native general editor is versus traditional.
And when we were talking about this earlier, you mentioned like a test or a dividing line that you've got.
Yeah, I mean, as I said, it's like software, and I think about incumbent software, and I can't believe I'm saying Xero is an incumbent.
It felt like only yesterday, Tom, when we were the disruptor, displacing Sage, you know, and taking on MYOB and others.
It is an incumbent in that it wasn't built in the era that the frontier models existed, that code was a thing.
It was built in an era where the primary user of the system to do the counting was a human.
And the AI native ledgers are built in a world where, frankly, you still have to have that because like, you know, so much of the actual work that gets done gets done by humans, but increasingly that work is being done by agents.
But you can optimize that work by building the right underlying infrastructure.
So I look at companies like Digits in the US or Briefcase now, New News in the UK, who had been born in that AI era versus companies like Xero's Sage and QuickBooks that are bolting on AI into their existing product.
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