Comment by typpo
7 hours ago
Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes.
My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree.
Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/
I feel like I'd be really skeptical of results from a non-deterministic model for something as precise as accounting....
The deterministic part (calculations) is done by Excel.
The non-deterministic part is turning human instructions ("calculate the NPV over 10 years for X given Y") into Excel.
This is already a non-deterministic process (humans are non-deterministic!). The question is if an AI model can be more reliable than humans, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.
The correct path is pretty clear, so the logits for following that path are going to be a long way from off-path.
For something like this the real problem is training the model to use Excel (which will show up by it being confused which sheet it is on or trying to use the wrong window or things like that), not the non-determinism.
With tool use you do reduce the risks.
It's not like these models calculate.
I know plenty of nondeterministic accountants
Yeah, seriously, I use AI all day every day but that terrifies me.
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Dont use Excel for accounting....
An Excel spreadsheet is a bad source of truth for data. It's fine for analytics though.
HN ignorance on display...
The Journal of Accountancy - "Bugged by Excel’s calculation errors" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-c...
ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants) — "Rounding Errors Revisited" (Excel Tips #447) - https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/e...
Just a reminder that an accountant who might say "I use Currency format" is still working in binary floating point as the format is just used as a display mask. And using VBA macros with the Currency type will hit problems at the boundary, when values move between the worksheet and the macro. The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...
"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
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Do they use it as a source of truth or do they import that data in a spreadsheet to let the user make their own calculations?
Not the person you responded to but I'm genuinely curious.
Afaik Excel is wicked fast at math (can handle ginormous spreadsheets, some real magic under the hood), while correctly doing decimal based math (1/5 is 0.2 exactly, not some floating point monstrosity)
A yes PWC :-) That is what I would expect :-))
I just hope the divine powers of Luca Pacioli might help you, before is too late. A whole set of accounting bodies and real world disasters expressly advise against its use and spreadsheets in general.
You even have dedicated pages...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spreadsheet_mistakes
EuSPRIG Horror Stories - Spreadsheet mistakes
https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
For example the (ICAEW) UK chartered accountants explicitly warn auditors. And research has shown that around 94% in these contexts contain errors:
"Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" - https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploads/faculty/se...
Also... Excel does not use exact decimal arithmetic. It stores numbers in IEEE-754 binary floating point, which cannot precisely represent many decimal values used in accounting. Microsoft documents this explicitly:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...
It also only preserves 15 significant digits and silently zeroes anything beyond that:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specificati...
So this means:
– decimal values are approximated
– rounding errors accumulate
– large financial values lose precision
– results depend on formula structure and rounding order
That alone disqualifies it as Accounting ledger. Historically you have lots of famous examples of bad outcomes of treating Excel as financial infrastructure...
The JPMorgan London Whale - $6B loss A flawed Excel risk model and copy paste errors understated risk and helped produce multi-billion losses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_JPMorgan_Chase_trading_lo...
TransAlta energy trading — $24M loss Simple spreadsheet row misalignment in bidding model cost aprox 10% of the company profit. https://www.lumeer.io/spreadsheet-for-project-management/
Fannie Mae - $1.3B reporting error wrong spreadsheet formula caused more than $1B accounting misstatement. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/28/microsoft... https://archive.is/w1cjj
Fidelity Magellan — $2.6B error Missing minus sign in a spreadsheet overstated capital gains by billions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spreadsheet_mistakes
Large audit firms also publish entire risk frameworks, ( and I am sure PWC does also...) explaining why uncontrolled spreadsheets are a major source of financial misstatement in the first place.
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This entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense. Probably time to move on. "Don't use Excel for accounting" has to be the dumbest thing I've read in a year, even with all of the LLM bullshit going on.
And that's including the people this morning who are apparently excited for LLMs to file their taxes.
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