AI now beats licensed accountants on bookkeeping tasks, but not on closing the books
AI tops CPAs on simplified accounting tasks, yet no model fully solves nearly 60% of the full benchmark, so replacement stays at task level.
A Mercor study says AI now outperforms licensed accountants on simplified accounting tasks.
The study had 12 licensed CPAs with an average of 5.5 years of experience work through simplified tasks from the APEX Accounting Benchmark; they averaged about 37%, and 18 months ago the best models scored below that. Today the models solve the same tasks almost flawlessly.
On the full APEX benchmark, which spans 160 tasks across 10 simulated companies, the leading model, Claude Opus 5.5, meets 61.8% of grading criteria, followed by Fable 5.1 at 61.0% and GPT-6 Astra at 57.9%. Mercor says no model fully solved almost 60% of the tasks.
Mercor acknowledges the tasks test exactly what AI does best, hunting down details and following instructions precisely, and leave out client conversations, colleague coordination and years of accumulated business context.
Sources:https://www.mercor.com/blog/human-baselines-for-benchmarks-ai-now-outperforms-junior-accountants