How Basis builds long-horizon accounting agents with Cursor
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Basis builds AI agents for auditors that automatically perform complex accounting tasks over multiple hours — such as annual financial statements and tax declarations — and return results ready for review.
The company uses Cursor to build and refine these agents, where they write instructions and rules in plain text that the agent follows. The main challenge is that long-running tasks contain hundreds of decisions where early mistakes can affect later steps, and a correct conclusion can hide an unreliable process. Basis solves this through "behavior specs" — Markdown documents that define how the agent should behave in specific situations, making it possible to assess the process, not just the result. An agent can complete work that normally takes 30-40 hours in approximately 6-7 hours, and Basis is reliable for 40 percent of the 25 largest audit firms.
These agents take on multi-hour, high-stakes work for leading accounting teams: month-end close, corporate and partnership tax returns, audit planning and fieldwork.
Vibekollen prepared this summary with AI from the original publication. The content belongs to Cursor.
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