ABOUT

I am a Director of Finance and Chartered Accountant with over 20 years experience across financial reporting and data analysis. For the past few years I have been using AI in that work every day - for traditional accounting tasks like reconciliations and automating month-end processes, and for more complex data analysis in Python and SQL that was not previously feasible. I also build with it: scripts and automations that now run reliably without any AI once they are done.

I only write about things I have tested against real work. If a technique did not change what I produced or how long it took, I did not publish it.

Templates and prompts circulate everywhere - a useful starting point. But they depend heavily on context, and the context almost always varies. You get good at AI by using AI; there is no substitute for the reps.

The part I find most interesting is building things with AI that then run without it - a script, a query, an automation. The output becomes deterministic and auditable even though the build process was not. Finance work is changing in ways I can see from where I sit; I write about what that looks like from inside a finance team.