Yes — for the draft. It cannot know how your practice actually works, so the only questions that matter are what you feed it and who signs the result.
Key takeaways
Yes, a general-purpose model will produce a competent-looking standard operating procedure in a minute. The catch is that it has read a great deal about how accounting and consulting practices are said to work, and nothing at all about how yours does. Left to its own priors it writes the average of everybody — a document that describes no real firm and that your staff will read once and never open again.
So the useful framing is not whether it can write one, but what you are giving it to write from and who signs it off. Drafting from your own artefacts produces a procedure you can put in front of a new hire. Generating from a prompt produces a document that reads like a textbook chapter.
Three inputs, in order of how much difference they make:
Without the first input the draft is generic. Without the second it will quietly omit the review step — review is the part that never appears in a screen recording, because it happens in somebody’s head three days later.
In a Canadian CPA practice a procedure is not a private convenience. It is the written form of part of the firm’s system of quality management. CSQM 1, Quality Management for Firms that Perform Audits or Reviews of Financial Statements, or Other Assurance or Related Services Engagements, required systems of quality management for related services engagements to be designed and implemented by 15 December 2023, with an evaluation of the system to follow. If you write an SOP that describes a different practice from the one your quality documentation describes, you now have two versions of the truth.
The equivalent point in a law firm is put more bluntly. The commentary to the competence rule notes that under the Law Society Act a lawyer fails to meet standards of professional competence where there are deficiencies in “the records, systems, or procedures of the lawyer’s professional business” that give rise to a reasonable apprehension about quality of service. Your procedures are not administrative housekeeping; they are part of what you are judged on.
For a sole or small-firm lawyer, one procedure is not optional at all. Since 1 January 2025, By-Law 7.1’s Part II.1 has required every licensee in private practice to maintain a written contingency plan for winding up or carrying on their practice if they become unexpectedly unable to work. At minimum the plan must name an administrator and record where every client file, trust account and piece of property can be found, and the by-law requires it to be reviewed at least once a year — one procedure in the library a firm is not permitted to let go stale.
This is the part firms underestimate. The Auditing and Assurance Standards Board approved CSRS 4250, Compilation Engagements on Future-oriented Financial Information and Pro Forma, at its 9–10 March 2026 meeting, replacing Assurance and Related Services Guideline AuG-16; it applies to compilation engagements where the report is dated on or after 1 July 2028. On the same schedule, paragraph 54 of CSRE 2400 is effective for reviews of financial statements for periods beginning on or after 15 December 2026.
A firm with forty procedures has no reliable way to know which of them mention superseded material. A model does: give it the change and the library, and it returns the list of documents that reference the old guideline. It cannot tell you what the new standard requires — read the standard for that — but it can tell you exactly where you are still describing the old one.
The first is the plausible draft. Symptoms are easy to spot once you know them: no named owner, no system names, no exceptions, every step written as a verb with nobody attached to it, and a suspicious absence of the awkward bits — the missing slip, the client who will not answer, the second reviewer.
The second is the transcript. If the recording you feed the tool contains a client’s name, income or account numbers, you have just moved client information into a third-party system. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s principles for responsible, trustworthy and privacy-protective generative AI are explicit about limiting collection, use and disclosure to what is needed for the identified purpose. Record the walkthrough on a de-identified or historic file, or redact before it goes anywhere.
A nine-person Ontario CPA practice wants one procedure written properly: assembling a personal tax file for review. Somebody records twenty-five minutes of doing it, narrating as they go. The recording is made against a prior-year file with the client identifiers removed. The transcript, the existing job checklist and one SOP the partner already likes go into the tool, with a short instruction naming the deadline, the review point and who may sign.
The draft comes back structurally right and factually thin. The manager corrects three things the recording could not show: the point at which a second reviewer is required, how a missing slip is handled, and the rule that client queries go out in one batch rather than dribbling out over a week. The partner approves it, the document gets an owner and a review date, and it goes in the library.
Then the only test that counts. Hand the approved procedure to the newest person in the office and watch them do the job from it. Every question they have to ask is a defect in the document, and the second draft writes itself from that list.
Does the SOP have to say we used AI to write it?
There is no general rule requiring it. What matters is that the approval is real and visible — a named owner, a date, and evidence somebody read it. Staff can tell when a document was published without being read, and they treat the whole library accordingly.
Who should own each procedure?
The person who does the work most often, not the most senior person in the room. Seniority belongs on the approval line, not the authorship line.
Is a policy the same thing as a procedure?
No. A procedure says how the work is done; a policy says what people may and may not do, and several are legally required of Ontario employers. Treadstone Law’s guide to workplace policies and the employee handbook sets out which ones.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
