AI Features & Skills

Kraal uses AI to automate accounting workflows, extract data from documents, categorize transactions, reconcile accounts, and generate financial reports. This page covers the full range of AI capabilities available to you.

Where AI work happens

You will usually interact with Kraal AI in three places:

• ChatIQ — ask client questions, continue conversations, generate reports, and open the right workspace.
• Daily Board and Work List — review AI-prepared work, review bundles, blocked items, and Kraal-handled activity.
• The Kraal assistant — review grouped work and let Kraal handle bounded low-risk actions when your firm's policy allows it.

ChatIQ and the Command Center are different surfaces: ChatIQ is the conversational entry point, while the Command Center is the AI task console where task runs, approvals, and artifacts live — it appears as Current Work in the accounting workspace sidebar.

AI Skills

Skills are organized by outcome. You can launch many of them from ChatIQ, the Kraal button in any workspace, or the workspace where the work belongs.

In ChatIQ, ask for the skills hub (for example, "show me skills") to open the AI Skills tile. Pick a client, browse the catalog by category, fill in the skill's inputs, and run it — each run creates an AI task you can track from the task view. Skills are different from Saved Actions (slash commands): a skill is a structured automation provided by Kraal, while a Saved Action is a reusable shortcut you or your firm creates.

1. Data Extraction

Upload documents — invoices, bank statements, receipts, tax forms — and the AI extracts structured data automatically. Document types are detected on upload, so you do not need to classify them manually.

2. Transaction Processing (GL Coding)

The AI categorizes transactions against your chart of accounts. Each suggested GL account mapping includes a confidence score so you can quickly identify items that need manual review.

3. Account Reconciliation

Match bank transactions to general ledger entries automatically. You can configure variance tolerance thresholds to control how closely amounts must match before requiring your review.

4. Financial Reporting

Generate standard financial reports and KPIs, including:

• Profit & Loss summary
• Balance sheet
• Variance analysis
• Cash flow statements

5. Data Analysis

Analyze and visualize financial data with charts and graphs. Capabilities include trend analysis, period-over-period comparisons, and forecasting.

6. Compliance & Tax

Apply tax codes based on jurisdiction-specific rules and validate transactions for compliance. The AI flags potential issues before they reach your ledger.

7. System Integration

Export data to external systems in standard formats:

• QuickBooks (QBO and IIF)
• CSV
• Bank import format

Cascade (Multi-Step AI Planning)

For complex requests, the AI uses Cascade to break work into a step-by-step plan. You can:

1. Submit a complex request (e.g., "Prepare the month-end close for March")
2. Review the plan the AI generates before any work begins
3. Approve the plan to start execution
4. Monitor progress through each step in real time

This gives you full visibility and control over multi-step processes.

The Kraal Button

Every workspace carries one Kraal button — the single place to meet your AI agent. It opens a side panel with four tabs — Ask, Review, and Activity, with Today set apart at the right edge:

• Ask — ask natural-language accounting questions about the client in scope and get answers without leaving your page. While Kraal works, it narrates what it is doing — "Reading trial balance…", then a done or failed mark per read — and the answer streams in as formatted text. Ask is page-aware: starter prompts like Explain this page are pre-loaded with what you're looking at, and the same Explain page buttons in page headers open this tab directly. With no client selected, Ask works across your whole portfolio ("who's blocked, what's most at risk, what to do first").
• Review — everything waiting on your judgment, in one ranked queue you can resolve inline. The tab shows a count when items are pending.
• Activity — the receipts ledger, so you can always see what the agent did and why, including what was handled across your clients.
• Today — the day's decisions in one list: "N decisions waiting," with each card chipped by what you'd do (unblock, approve, review, answer) and groupable by action, money, or client. Actions confirm in place with an Undo, the addressed state is shared with your team, and the bottom strip tallies what was handled today with a link to receipts.

The panel opens onto Ask by default; on the Daily Board it is docked into the page and opens onto Today. It follows the app's color mode, and it is an entry point, not a new authority level: every action inside it follows the same approvals, autonomy policy, and audit trail as the full workspace pages.

Ask Kraal Composer

For work you want to hand off, the Ask Kraal composer is the conversational assistant that turns instructions into reviewable AI tasks. Ask a question or delegate a job — about a client's financials, a specific transaction, or how to perform a task — and get answers or a tracked task in context. From the Kraal panel's Ask tab, choose Delegate to Kraal to escalate a question into the composer.

When the result includes report artifacts, review the source notes and generated files before sending client-facing material. If a result is marked provisional, regenerate or verify it from live books before delivery.

AI Playbooks

Playbooks are guided work sessions run by Kraal's AI engine on real accounting workflows. They are useful when you want a repeatable, approval-gated process instead of a one-off chat response.

Current playbooks drive work such as AP payment runs, AR collections passes, bank reconciliation, client document chases, close catch-up, inventory document flow, work queue sweeps, report pack delivery, and Transaction Processor review sessions.

Playbooks are bounded by review and approval guardrails. Kraal assesses live state, batches the work, and proposes each consequential action; nothing is posted or sent before a person approves it, and judgment items are routed to you.

See AI Playbooks for the current playbook list and usage guidance.

AI Task Lifecycle

Every AI task moves through a defined lifecycle:

Queued > Running > Completed

Along the way a task may enter Waiting on you when it needs your input or approval before it can continue. Tasks can also end in Failed (an error occurred), Timed out, or Cancelled (stopped by a user). You can track each task's current status from task detail, the Activity Log, Work List, or the Audit Center depending on the scope of review.

Slash Commands

Type slash commands in the chat panel to trigger workflow shortcuts — for example, /pbc kicks off a Prepared by Client request.

Slash commands can be scoped to your user account or shared across your organization. Commands use a simple template syntax for configurable parameters.

Customize AI

Adjust how the AI behaves on a per-client or per-organization basis. Customization options let you set preferences for categorization rules, reporting formats, and default behaviors so the AI aligns with your firm's standards.

Safety Guardrails

Kraal's AI operates within clear boundaries, set per client. Work falls into three tiers:

Always autonomous (read-only) — no approval needed:

• Suggest journal entries and categorizations
• Generate reports and analysis
• Extract data from uploaded documents
• Draft reconciliation matches

Supervised posting (only when a client is in Supervised mode, and only within strict guardrails):

• Post eligible low-risk, routine entries such as accrual reversals, depreciation, and prepaid amortization — capped by amount, daily volume, materiality, and confidence, and logged for one-click undo.

Scheduled recurring Journal Entries are a separate workflow: Kraal generates them as drafts for review and submission. See Recurring Entries before relying on one during close.

Always waits for your approval:

• High-risk or judgment-heavy entries (tax provisions, equity, revenue recognition, goodwill/impairment, related-party, prior-period adjustments)
• Deleting any records
• Modifying chart-of-accounts structure
• Sending anything to a client

To keep a client fully hands-on, set it to Approval-first (Locked Down) — then Kraal posts nothing without you.

➡️ See Autonomy & Safety for the full model, the guardrails, and how to set autonomy per client.