AI in Financial Reporting

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It has been a while since I posted, but I have been getting a lot of questions lately from clients and from my accounting students about the same topic:  Where does AI actually belong in the financial reporting process?  Everyone wants to know if they should be using it, and the honest answer is that it depends a lot on which part of the process you are talking about. I have been working with several clients on this over the last few months, plus I have an upcoming speaking session on AI in reporting, so I thought I would put some of these thoughts together here. For each point, I am also going to push back on myself a little, because I think that is a more useful way to think through this than just picking a side. Where AI is actually helping right now The clearest win I have seen is variance analysis. AI tools are good at scanning through a large number of GL lines and flagging the ones that look different from what history would predict. Think of a vendor payment that...
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Big news from Microsoft on paginated reports

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To follow up on my earlier posting about using the right tool for the right job, I had to share the latest announcement from Microsoft.  On November 14, 2022, Microsoft announced support for paginated reports in Power BI Pro.  


Yes, this now means without acquiring a premium license or premium workspace, you will be able to create paginated reports.  No longer will you just have a scrolling table or matrix that you have to export to Excel, you will be able to create more traditional operational reports as well as document-like reports.


I am excited to see how everyone puts this new functionality to work.  I have a lot of ideas on how I will use this with my clients, especially with some of their common ERP (Dynamics 365) report requests.

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