Scaling accounting capacity with OpenAI

Some startups use AI to solve a point-in-time problem. Others build systems that get better as AI improves. Basis⁠(opens in a new window) is the latter.

Founded in 2023, Basis builds AI agents used by top accounting firms—designed to take on structured accounting work with the reliability and depth those tasks require. The team uses OpenAI o3, o3‑Pro, GPT‑4.1, and GPT‑5 to power AI agents that help accounting firms automate repetitive tasks like reconciliations, journal entries, and financial summaries while giving accountants full visibility into how decisions are made and control over the process. The result is up to 30% time savings and increased capacity for high-leverage work, like advising clients and taking on new business.

As OpenAI’s models evolve, Basis compounds those improvements. Each new release expands what agents can handle, boosting reasoning quality, speeding up reviews, and unlocking more sophisticated workflows. 

“We’ve worked with OpenAI from day one,” says Mitchell Troyanovsky, co-founder of Basis. “Each model improvement broadens what our agents can take on. As reasoning improves, we unlock more complex, longer-running workflows and grant our agents greater autonomy.”

Routing accounting tasks to the right OpenAI model

Basis treats accounting as a system of workflows, each with its own context and complexity. To support that, the team built a multi-agent architecture that assigns the best-fit OpenAI model to the right job.

Each task begins with a supervising agent, originally built on OpenAI o3 and now migrated to GPT‑5, which coordinates the full process—routing steps to specialized sub-agents based on task, complexity, latency needs, and input type. GPT‑5 is the strongest model Basis has evaluated to date in reasoning, consistency, and explainability, making it well-suited to guide agents across high-context workflows with minimal oversight.

This orchestration allows Basis to continuously improve task coverage and accuracy as model capabilities grow.