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.
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On simplified tasks from the APEX Accounting Benchmark, AI now solves them almost flawlessly, surpassing the roughly 37% average of 12 licensed CPAs with 5.5 years of experience — a comparison drawn from a Mercor study.
Eighteen months earlier, the best models still scored below that human level, leaving AI's replacement ability under the accountants'.
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.