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How to choose an AI for your finance team

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Check three things before an AI tool touches your books: ledger access, Excel or Sheets, who can stop a payment. Test one real job first.

Does this job need live access to your ledger?

  • Yes: Read-only access only. Keep writes and payments human-controlled.

  • No, an export is enough:

    Is there a named approver who can stop a payment?

    • No: Stop. Name that approver first.

    • Yes:

      Is the job in Excel or Google Sheets?

      • Excel: Test current Excel support this week (How to test it).

      • Google Sheets: Test current Sheets support; tools differ most here.

What I'd use in a sprint

Opus 5.5 on xhigh to plan, Sonnet 5.5 on medium or high to build, Opus 5.5 on medium or GPT-6.1 on high for harder tasks.

Matt's own setup, 1 November 2026. His choice, not a ranking of which models are best.

How to test it this week

  • Build one fictional month-end reconciliation: a trial balance, a bank feed export and three deliberate exceptions. Make two identical sanitized copies, with no real customer, payroll or ledger data.
  • Run the same copy through ChatGPT and through Claude, with the same prompt and the same files, and compare every total, formula and source row each one returns against the original.
  • Excel: open the copy with Claude for Excel (paid Claude plans) and with ChatGPT's Excel extension (Plus or above; Free and Go are Limited). Before you accept anything, check every cell each tool changed is shown to you, and that nothing is saved until you say so.
  • Google Sheets: ChatGPT lists a Google Sheets extension; Claude for Google Workspace adds a Claude sidebar to Sheets (beta, on Pro, Max, Ultra, Team or Enterprise; your Workspace admin may need to allow it). It edits the open sheet in place, so keep it on Ask before edits, then check every change in File > Version history and recheck every formula.
  • Count the material errors in each tool's output and time how long a human needs to fix them before the file is postable.
  • Require a named person's sign-off before anything is marked ready to post or pay, and stop the test the moment an unresolved error appears rather than let the tool carry on past it.
  • Pick the tool with the least fixing time, but only among the ones that passed the correctness and approval checks above. An equal result on both counts means no demonstrated winner this month.

Sources

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The next step is the same for every job on this site: open the Job Picker and start with one.

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