Checking AI's work

The idea

AI proposes, a person approves. Whatever AI reads, hears or suggests arrives as a draft. Nothing reaches the books, the price list or a customer until a named person has checked it against the evidence and said yes. The AI saves the typing; the person keeps the responsibility.

The approval card

Every proposed entry should come to the approver as one card with three things on it:

1. The draft — party, items, quantities, rates, tax, total.
2. The evidence — the photo, the voice recording, the bank line it came from.
3. The doubts — fields the AI was unsure of, marked so the eye goes there first.

The approver does four checks, in this order:

Then one of three actions: approve, correct and approve, or reject with a reason.

At the counter

The evening batch has 23 proposed entries: 15 sales orders spoken by salesmen, 6 purchase bills photographed at the godown, 2 bank receipts read from the statement.

The accounts clerk opens each card. 19 are right as proposed. 3 need one field corrected — a quantity, a unit, a product with a similar name. 1 is rejected: a photo of a bill that was already entered yesterday, sent again by the godown. Posting it would have shown ₹36,000 of stock that never arrived.

The whole batch takes 25 minutes. Typing it from scratch took two and a half hours. The time saved is real — but only because the 25 minutes were spent.

Rules worth writing down

• Nothing posts itself. No setting that says "auto-approve if the AI is confident".
• The approver is named. The software records who approved, when, and what was changed. That is your audit trail (chapter 4.11).
• Some things always need the owner. A new price, a new credit limit, a credit note above an amount you fix, a payment to a new bank account.
• Fixes follow the old rule. If an approved entry turns out wrong, correct the document; the postings follow (chapter 1.14).
• Count the corrections. If one kind of document needs fixing again and again, change how it is captured — better photos, clearer speech, a cleaner master.

Common mistake

Approving in bulk. After a week of correct drafts, the clerk selects all 23 cards and taps approve. The one duplicate bill goes straight into the books. A month later the stock count is short, the supplier's ledger doesn't match his statement, and nobody can say who approved it, because everyone did. "Approved" must mean "I looked at this one".

Where you'll use this

This is two keys from Part 2 (chapter 2.11) — one hand prepares, another checks — with AI as the first hand. The rules it protects are from Part 1: every entry starts with a document (chapter 1.2), and the five link rules (chapter 1.18) still decide whether the books are right.

Check yourself

1. What three things should every approval card show?
2. The lines of a draft add up to ₹1,16,800 but the total says ₹1,18,000. What does that tell you?
3. Why is "approve all" dangerous even when the AI has been right all week?

Answers

1. The draft, the evidence it came from, and the fields the AI was unsure of.
2. At least one line was misread (₹1,200 is missing) — check each line against the paper before approving.
3. The one wrong draft goes in unchecked, and no one can say who actually checked it.