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.
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)
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.
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:
– 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...
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.
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.
I've been having the same feelings lately, especially around the AI doomers coming in with some weird observations that make no sense. I usually don't comment, but seeing a lot of these types of overgeneralized responses.
You don't really deserve a response, but even the idea that you could tell someone to not use Excel for accounting and seriously project that you know anything about how accounting works in the real world is hilarious.
You could think 500 random internet articles - it doesn't matter. The assertion is still ridiculous. You literally will not be able to get a job as an accountant without being able to use Excel. Don't be an idiot.
You can also link to hundreds of articles showing that dynamic types cause errors. People don't care, they still use them when it makes sense to use them. There is no better mainstream alternative for accounting than Excel right now, period.
Based on the article... is this basically just making Claude better at formatting and data presentation, or does it also get better at analysis? I get the impression it's the former.
You'll use a ton of AI but it won't wipe the humans out. In the end you'll have a compositional change, likely nothing catastrophic imo. In part because there is a buck to stop and Claude ain't got no hands...
Anthropic does anything to keep the Claude hype going; from fearmongering ("AI bad, need government regulations") to wishful thinking ("90% of code will be written by AI by the end of 2025" —Dario) to using Claude in applications it has no business being in (Cowork, accessing all your files, what could go wrong?) to releasing "research" papers every now and then to show how their AI "almost got out" and they stopped it (again, to show their models are "just that good") to prescribing what the society should do to adapt to the new reality to doing worthless surveys on "how AI is reshaping economy, but mostly our AI not others".
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/
"Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets"
Erm so they didnt do any accounting or reporting in spreadsheets prior?
Lmao
Dont use Excel for accounting....
An Excel spreadsheet is a bad source of truth for data. It's fine for analytics though.
HN ignorance in 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...
Lol stupid posts like this make me question this place.
My brother who is a tax auditor at PWC uses spreadsheets all day long. Who are you again?
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.
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.
I've been having the same feelings lately, especially around the AI doomers coming in with some weird observations that make no sense. I usually don't comment, but seeing a lot of these types of overgeneralized responses.
'oh you do x? You don't do y? You're an idiot'
That's not productive.
I have the impression today you will be one of the 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/
But you are correct, this entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense... :-)
"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
"Classification of Spreadsheet Errors" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224
"A study conducted by Coopers & Lybrand found errors in 90% of the spreadsheets audited."
"Impact of Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" - https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715
"What We Don’t Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601
You don't really deserve a response, but even the idea that you could tell someone to not use Excel for accounting and seriously project that you know anything about how accounting works in the real world is hilarious.
You could think 500 random internet articles - it doesn't matter. The assertion is still ridiculous. You literally will not be able to get a job as an accountant without being able to use Excel. Don't be an idiot.
You can also link to hundreds of articles showing that dynamic types cause errors. People don't care, they still use them when it makes sense to use them. There is no better mainstream alternative for accounting than Excel right now, period.
this might just be the worst advice I’ve ever read here - well done mate, well done
Based on the article... is this basically just making Claude better at formatting and data presentation, or does it also get better at analysis? I get the impression it's the former.
Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:
It's time to sell hedge fund stocks!! Jokes aside, I took the CFA exam last week and now I'm starting to worry about my career...
You'll use a ton of AI but it won't wipe the humans out. In the end you'll have a compositional change, likely nothing catastrophic imo. In part because there is a buck to stop and Claude ain't got no hands...
I wouldnt worry. Unless you are just memorising stuff and dont actually understand anything - then you should.
Their chart only goes up to 70.
Anthropic does anything to keep the Claude hype going; from fearmongering ("AI bad, need government regulations") to wishful thinking ("90% of code will be written by AI by the end of 2025" —Dario) to using Claude in applications it has no business being in (Cowork, accessing all your files, what could go wrong?) to releasing "research" papers every now and then to show how their AI "almost got out" and they stopped it (again, to show their models are "just that good") to prescribing what the society should do to adapt to the new reality to doing worthless surveys on "how AI is reshaping economy, but mostly our AI not others".