With Tabby, a former accountant is using AI to make accountants obsolete

借助 Tabby，一位前会计师正利用人工智能让会计职业成为历史

In May of 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant, overseeing a team of 20 people and handling more than 2,000 returns a year. “We did bookkeeping, accounting, sales tax, taxes, everything,” Ali says. It was a stable business, and one that would have been easy to stay in. But Ali started to notice something. His work was increasingly dictated by the frictions of accounting software, which was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He became frustrated with specific accounting software like QuickBooks, and soon he became frustrated with the entire idea of SaaS-based accounting. “I realized that small businesses don’t need better accounting software,” Ali told TechCrunch. “They need less accounting software. They need something that just does it for them.”

2025 年 5 月，Ahad Ali 还是一位事业有成的会计师，管理着一个 20 人的团队，每年处理超过 2,000 份报税表。“我们负责记账、会计、销售税、税务，什么都做，”Ali 说。那是一项稳定的业务，本可以安稳地做下去。但 Ali 开始注意到一些问题：他的工作日益受到会计软件各种繁琐限制的支配，而这些软件在设计时很少考虑到会计师的实际需求。他开始对 QuickBooks 等特定的会计软件感到沮丧，不久之后，他对整个 SaaS（软件即服务）模式的会计理念也产生了厌倦。“我意识到，小企业需要的不是更好的会计软件，”Ali 告诉 TechCrunch，“他们需要的是更少的会计软件。他们需要的是一种能直接帮他们完成工作的工具。”

Now, Ali is building just that. His product, Tabby, is designed to be a real-time bookkeeping interface, handling clients’ paperwork as it gives them up-to-the-minute data on their business’s profit and loss. Using Plaid to import live account data, Tabby uses AI to quickly build a real-time dashboard for a business’s financial health. There’s also a version of Tabby for accounting firms that want a smarter alternative to QuickBooks, but Ali’s goal is to go direct to the end user as often as possible. As Ali sees it, products like Tabby have a chance to automate away the work of bookkeeping once and for all, turning it into a monthly charge on the order of internet access or payroll services. If successful, it could seriously change the calculus of operating a small business. “You can say QuickBooks digitized bookkeeping,” Ali told TechCrunch, “but we want to make [that visible software layer] nonexistent.”

现在，Ali 正在打造这样一款产品。他的产品 Tabby 被设计为一个实时记账界面，在处理客户文书工作的同时，为他们提供最新的企业损益数据。Tabby 利用 Plaid 导入实时账户数据，并通过人工智能快速构建企业财务状况的实时仪表盘。Tabby 也为那些想要寻找比 QuickBooks 更智能替代方案的会计师事务所提供了版本，但 Ali 的目标是尽可能直接面向终端用户。在 Ali 看来，像 Tabby 这样的产品有机会彻底实现记账工作的自动化，将其变成像互联网接入或薪资服务一样的月度收费项目。如果成功，这将彻底改变小企业的运营成本计算方式。“你可以说 QuickBooks 将记账数字化了，”Ali 告诉 TechCrunch，“但我们想要让（那种可见的软件层）彻底消失。”

So far, it seems to be working. Fourteen months in, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses using the platform, with roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people — Ali, his technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist — and in the process of raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. When I spoke to Ali, his team was just preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product.

到目前为止，进展似乎很顺利。上线 14 个月后，Tabby 已经拥有 5,500 家小企业用户，年经常性收入约为 10 万美元。团队目前仅有 7 人——包括 Ali、他的技术联合创始人、四名工程师和一名市场推广专家——并且正在筹集 100 万美元的种子轮前融资。当我与 Ali 交谈时，他的团队正准备推出 Tabby Talk，这是该产品的一个自然语言交互界面。

There’s plenty of competition in the accounting space, particularly now that AI has shaken things up. Ali has his eyes focused on QuickBooks, which is still the biggest player — but he’ll also be facing well-funded startups like the Sequoia-backed Rillet, as well as the major labs’ own finance tools. It’s a daunting task, but Ali thinks that Tabby can carve out a niche by focusing on the same small- to medium-sized firms that helped his accounting business thrive. “Everything we see is making us believe that there’s a path for other players, because the space is big,” Ali told TechCrunch. “There’s 30 million more businesses.”

会计领域竞争激烈，尤其是在人工智能搅动行业格局的当下。Ali 的目标是 QuickBooks，它目前仍是该领域最大的玩家，但他也将面临资金雄厚的初创公司（如红杉资本支持的 Rillet）以及各大 AI 实验室自研财务工具的挑战。这是一项艰巨的任务，但 Ali 认为，Tabby 可以通过专注于那些曾帮助他会计业务蓬勃发展的中小企业来开辟利基市场。“我们所看到的一切都让我们相信，其他参与者仍有机会，因为这个市场足够大，”Ali 告诉 TechCrunch，“还有 3,000 万家企业等待服务。”