If you work in accounts and finance

Where it genuinely helps

The useful list in accountancy and finance is longer than most people expect, and it has a common feature: every item takes figures you already have and turns them into words, or takes words and turns them into a structure.

• Management commentary. You supply the variances and the causes; it drafts the narrative. This is drudgery that has to read well and contains no discretion once the causes are known.
• Explaining a figure to somebody who is not financial. "Explain why our creditor days moved from 41 to 58, for an operations manager, in 80 words, no jargon."
• Formulas. Ask for the formula, never for the answer, and test it on rows you can verify by hand.
• Turning a supplier statement into a table you can reconcile, from a PDF you extracted exactly.
• A first pass over a long contract for the financial terms — payment days, indexation, termination costs, caps — against a checklist you wrote.
• Covering notes, chasers, and the sixty short letters that go with a billing run.

The one place it must never touch

The ledger.

Nothing generative writes to the accounting system. Postings are made by people, or by deterministic rules that a person wrote and tested. This is not caution for its own sake: a posting is a record, records are what the accounts are made of, and a plausible-looking journal is worse than a missing one because it reconciles.

The same applies to anything that flows into the ledger without a human reading it — an automated coding rule driven by a model, an invoice-matching step that posts on a confidence score. Those can exist, and every one of them needs a human approval gate before the posting, exactly as the automation lesson describes.

The failure that will catch you

Ask why travel costs rose 18 per cent and you will get an answer: conference season, fuel prices, a return to in-person client meetings after a quiet quarter. It will be well written, businesslike, and entirely invented, because the model has no access whatever to your causes.

You will not feel it happening. The narrative is exactly the narrative a competent finance business partner would write, which is the problem — it was generated from what such narratives usually say.

The rule is one direction only. You establish the cause; it writes the sentence. Anything else is a fabricated explanation with your name on it, in a document somebody will make a decision from.

Arithmetic, and whether your tool runs code

Multi-step arithmetic is a known weakness. Most serious products now detect a calculation and hand it to a real code interpreter, which fixes it — but whether yours does, in the mode you are using, is a question of fact.

Test it. Ask for a calculation you can verify: a compound figure over seven periods, or a proration across an odd number of days. Then check by hand. If the answer is wrong, you know that this tool, in this mode, is completing text rather than computing, and no amount of "please be accurate" changes that.

Tax and regulation: the confidently outdated answer

Rates, thresholds, allowances and filing deadlines change annually and differ by jurisdiction. A model's training has a cutoff and its answer has no date attached.

The failure is specific: you get last year's threshold, in this year's confident register, with no indication that it is stale. Never take a rate, a threshold, a deadline or a form number from a model. Take it from the revenue authority's own page, every time, and let the model help you explain it once you have it.

Confidentiality, and the account tier

Client financial data is confidential under every accountancy body's ethics code, and the international code that most national bodies adopt makes confidentiality a fundamental principle rather than a client-by-client preference. Management accounts, payroll, a due diligence pack, an insolvency file — none of these belong in a consumer chat window.

The account tier lesson in the previous block is the load-bearing one here. So is redaction, which in finance usually means removing the client's identity from the narrative as well as the header, because a description of a business is often more identifying than its name.

One sharper point: in anti-money-laundering work, tipping-off provisions restrict who may be told what about a suspicion. A drafting tool is a disclosure to a third party. Suspicious activity reporting is not a task to hand to an outside service.

The free path

LibreOffice Calc does everything a finance spreadsheet needs, including pivot tables and goal seek. OpenRefine cleans supplier and customer data properly. pdftotext and Tabula extract statements exactly. A local model through Ollama handles the drafting for anything with a client's name in it, and handles it well, because narrative drafting from figures you supply is precisely the task where a small model is close to a large one.

The audit trail is the last piece: keep the figures, the brief and the reviewer's name with the document, because "how was this estimate arrived at" is a question you will be asked, and "I asked a model" is not an answer that survives it.