CPD · Intermediate
AI-Powered Financial Reporting, Analysis, Financial Modelling & Automation
Bring AI into the finance work you already do — preparing statements and notes from a trial balance, reconciliations, financial models, business plans and dashboards — inside Excel and Claude, with the review habits that keep the output yours. Recorded from the August 2026 live cohort: five days, 66 lessons, about 12 hours.
Included with Knowsia Premium. Participants of the live cohort receive access through their course registration.
What you will be able to do
- Prepare a full set of financial statements and IFRS-aligned notes from a trial balance with AI assistance, then validate and review them
- Anonymise and handle financial data safely before it goes anywhere near an AI tool
- Write finance-specific prompts that produce usable, checkable output — and recognise when the output is wrong
- Set up Claude, the Excel add-in, projects, connectors and desktop automation for finance work
- Analyse cash flow and ratios and build a management dashboard from the statements
- Package a reporting or reconciliation workflow as a reusable AI skill for every month-end
- Build and stress-test a financial model, and derive a bank business plan and an investor plan from it
- Automate reconciliations — including foreign-currency reconciliations — with scripts you have tested
- Apply an AI governance and review workflow before any AI-assisted output is submitted
About this course
Accounting and finance professionals are under pressure to prepare reports faster, analyse more data and build reliable models — usually with the same hours and the same tools. This course shows how to put AI to work inside that workflow rather than beside it, and how to keep professional judgement, review and data care in charge of the result.
It is the complete recording of the August 2026 live cohort, cut into short lessons you can watch in order or dip into by task. Over five days the facilitator works through real finance jobs on screen:
- Foundations — what AI can and cannot do for finance work, data hygiene and anonymising client figures, prompt engineering for accountants, and setting up Claude, projects, connectors and desktop automation.
- Financial reporting — installing the AI add-in for Excel, generating a full set of financial statements and IFRS notes from a trial balance, validating the trial balance, repairing formulas, and reviewing what the model produced.
- Analysis, dashboards and reusable skills — cash-flow and ratio analysis, a dashboard from the statements, and packaging the reporting workflow as a reusable skill so next month's close starts where this one ended. Privacy settings and cybersecurity for finance data.
- Financial modelling — a case study built with AI scaffolding: model requirements, planning prompts, review of the model's logic, then a bank business plan and an investor plan from the same model.
- Reconciliation and automation — reconciliation prompts and skills, building trial balances, foreign-currency reconciliation, automation scripts with testing and refinement, and an AI governance workflow for review before anything is submitted.
Every lesson is the facilitator's own screen, so you see the prompts as typed, the outputs as returned — including the ones that needed correcting — and the review steps that follow.
You will need Microsoft Excel (Microsoft 365 recommended) and a Claude account; the lessons cover setting both up. No previous AI experience is assumed. Intermediate Excel — formulas and pivot tables — and a working knowledge of financial statements will let you follow the worked examples in full.
Who it is for
- Accountants, finance officers and controllers who prepare or review management and financial reports
- FP&A analysts and budget officers who build models and forecasts
- Finance managers and SME CFOs who want a faster, leaner reporting cycle
- Audit and internal-audit professionals looking to speed up analytical procedures and reconciliations
- ICAG, ACCA and CIMA students who want practical, employable AI skills
- Business owners who want to understand and produce their own reports
Syllabus
Day 1 — Monday 10 August 202613 lessons · 2½ h
Foundations. What AI is good for in finance and what it is not; data hygiene and privacy before any figure leaves your desk; prompt engineering for accountants; setting up Claude, projects, knowledge, connectors and desktop automation — and a first automation, seen end to end, in the certificate demos.
Day 2 — Tuesday 11 August 202617 lessons · 2½ h
Financial reporting. Installing Claude Desktop and the Excel add-in; generating a full set of financial statements and notes from a trial balance; trial-balance validation, formula repair, statement structure and linkages, the disclosure notes, the cash-flow statement — and reviewing everything the model produced.
Day 3 — Wednesday 12 August 202613 lessons · 2½ h
Analysis, dashboards and reusable skills. Statements and notes again at speed, cash-flow and ratio analysis, a dashboard from the statements; privacy settings and cybersecurity for finance data; packaging the workflow as a reusable financial-statement skill and testing it with Cowork.
Day 4 — Thursday 13 August 202611 lessons · 1½ h
Financial modelling. A case study from requirements to a working model with AI scaffolding — planning prompts, Claude skills and a Cowork folder, then a review of the model's logic — and from the same model, a bank business plan and an investor plan. Closes with the assignment.
Day 5 — Friday 14 August 202612 lessons · 2 h
Reconciliation and automation. Reconciliation prompts and results, building trial balances, a prompt-engineering framework, reusable reconciliation skills, foreign-currency reconciliation, automation scripts with testing and refinement, review procedures, and an AI governance workflow for what goes out of the door.