AI + Financial Reporting
I often see people asking about practical AI applications that actually impact how they work. In the interest of sharing knowledge and hopefully learning from each other, I thought I would throw out some recent successes that we have experienced.
We use Power BI to aggregate accounting detail from our ERP. Since it includes the entire GL, this allows us to create a plethora of reports from income statement, balance sheet, to G&A analysis, capital expenditures, and many more. Each one of these reports has a mapping of which GL account codes roll up into each report caption.
This is all pretty common but here's where it gets interesting with the introduction of AI. As you can imagine these mappings become a bit onerous to maintain as you get more and more reports out there. Creating a new GL account, for example, requires a careful review (with accounting expertise) to make sure that new codes gets mapped to every place in every report where it belongs. IT folks don't know what a balance sheet is, much less how NI rolls to RE.
This has proven to be the perfect job for Claude. We can have Power BI export the chart of accounts to a SharePoint folder every night. We give a Claude "agent" access to this folder along with the mapping csv. There is no coding involved. In plain English we explain what the task is. Every morning Claude checks for any new account codes that have not yet been mapped to the financial statements. When found it sends a Teams message along with recommendations of where that account should be mapped across all reports (based on similar codes). You can approve or revise these mappings right there over Teams chat and Claude makes the changes accordingly.
We have found the accuracy to be truly impressive. This has sped up the process and dramatically reduced human error. The project is approachable as there's no coding involved. From a privacy standpoint the agent is only privy to the chart of accounts and the report captions themselves. No transactions, balances, or dollars are visible which limits the privacy concerns. It has made our clients very happy.
Anyway, if you're not exploring these types of tools, I highly recommend you spend some time playing with them. If you have a better workflow or suggestions for mine, I would love to hear about it.