Have the AI keep a log you can sign off on, starting with reconciliation

sweetmelon team · Finance

Month end, and a schedule lands on your desk for sign-off. The numbers look plausible. What you can't see is where any of them came from, and your name is the one going on it. Start the AI somewhere with a right answer. Reconciling the bank statement against the ledger is a good place, because a wrong method shows up as a total that doesn't tie. Give it two rules. Cells hold formulas, so clicking one shows which rows it pulled and at what rate. And beside the workbook it keeps a plain-language log, a line per step: which report it took, how it grouped the entries, which rows it left out and why. Now review the log rather than the numbers. Disagree with a step and you write that next to the line, which is also how the next month starts. Once several months have gone by where you can follow every step it took, let it prepare the draft entries themselves. Whoever posts them still isn't the person who signs them off. None of this makes the work faster on the first pass. It makes it checkable, which is the part you were signing for anyway.