Verifiable financial reporting
How can you prototype an assistant that prepares traceable financial reporting without delegating the validation of the figures?
3500 € per session, excl. VAT
In short
Two days, amounting to 14 hours excluding breaks, to design a prototype financial reporting assistant. You structure the data, separate calculations from generated commentary, build controls and test a monthly report. The result includes a documented prototype and a pilot plan, subject to financial validation before any operational use.
Why this training?
Convincing financial commentary can conceal an inconsistent scope, an incorrect formula or an invented cause. Reporting requires every amount to be linked to its source and every explanation to evidence. Generative AI can prepare a synthesis and flag points for review. The solution designed keeps calculations within a verifiable chain and requires validation by a qualified financial professional. Running case study: Montérel Composants, a fictitious organisation, is preparing its monthly reporting for two sites. Its fictitious files contain actuals, budget and historical data, with a duplicate, a missing period and divergent sign conventions. The assistant must comment on revenue, margin and expenses without inventing the causes of variances. Transfer to the workplace: After the training, propose a pilot using a past period-end close, in an authorised environment. Compare the assisted report with the validated report, measure the corrections needed and decide with the finance manager whether to continue, revise or suspend.
Objectives of this training
- Define the assistant’s scope and limitations
- Structure a financial data contract
- Configure a prototype that produces source-referenced commentary
- Measure quality using a test set
- Formalise the conditions for launching the pilot
Who is it for and what are the prerequisites?
Roles and tasks concerned
- Management accountants and those responsible for monthly reporting
- Finance managers and data leads involved in an AI pilot
Prior skills
- Have a sound grasp of budget-to-actual variances and margin indicators.
- Use a spreadsheet and have experience making structured requests to generative AI.
- Understand the responsibilities for validating financial reporting.
What you will work on
Define the scope of the target reporting
Objective: Establish permitted uses. Recipients, frequency, scope; no automated sensitive decisions.
Establish a data contract
Objective: Make inputs comparable. Periods, units, currencies, signs and accounting mappings.
Safeguard calculations
Objective: Establish an independent reference. Absolute variances, percentages, zero denominators and reconciliations.
Design the architecture
Objective: Separate calculation from generation. Validated inputs, deterministic calculations, narrative generation, human review.
Set boundaries for commentary
Objective: Produce a traceable narrative. References, materiality thresholds and abstention where evidence is lacking.
Assemble the prototype
Objective: Generate a complete report. Validated tables, commentary and a list of caveats.
Test failures
Objective: Verify fallback behaviour. Conflicting sources, missing data, extraneous instructions treated as data.
Measure quality
Objective: Assess errors objectively. Numerical accuracy, reference coverage, unsupported assertions.
Correct and retest
Objective: Verify improvements. Diagnosis of data, calculation or wording errors.
Prepare the pilot
Objective: Organise a controlled experiment. Access, validation, retention, shutdown and return to standard reporting.
What you take away
- Data contract and indicator dictionary
- Documented prototype and report template with commentary
- Test set, results and anomaly register
- Pilot plan with responsibilities and stop criteria
Method and assessment
- Brief explanations followed by immediate practice on the case study used throughout.
- Individual work followed by work in pairs, with participants reviewing each other’s outputs.
- Guided group review: what works, what needs correcting and what remains a human decision.
- Preparation: Arrange access to the tools authorised by the organisation; the exercises use only fictitious or anonymised data. Bring an anonymised reporting template and identify your usual financial checks.
Observable criteria: Each published amount is reconciled with the reference calculation within the documented tolerance. ; Each commentary distinguishes between observations, hypotheses and missing information. ; The tests cover a duplicate, a missing period, a reversed sign and a malicious instruction in a source. ; The report retains the data references and the version of the instructions. ; The pilot provides for explicit financial validation before distribution..
Frequently asked questions
Does an application need to be developed?
No; a documented workflow is sufficient to test the prototype.
Does the assistant automatically explain variances?
It proposes explicitly labelled hypotheses, never causes without evidence.
Can actual accounts be shared?
Not during these exercises; any subsequent use depends on internal authorisations.
Is the prototype ready for production?
No; security, financial validation and legal conditions still need to be checked with the relevant departments.
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