Identify Errors with AI for Financial Planning and Analysis

AI is everywhere now, and diverse industries are starting to work out what the most effective uses of AI are in their field. One of the most obvious and impactful uses of AI in financial planning and analysis, as we have seen with Firmbase’s users, is identifying and preventing errors. 

AI in Operation 

AI is a powerful technology, but as with anything, the tool is only as good as the use you make of it. Strong trends are emerging in the ways which very different kinds of users, with very different use cases, find most effective when it comes to putting AI to good use. 

According to Forbes, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency began using AI in 2024 to speed up its work, and “Director David Cattler said the agency’s most promising use case for these tools is prioritizing existing threats.” AI company Anthropic, meanwhile, reports that the top three ways that people use its popular Claude chatbot are app development, content creation and communication, and academic research and writing.

Firmbase’s users, meanwhile, use our AI-first platform to improve forecasting, collaborate with other departments using a unified business language, create models and budgets quickly and efficiently, work on strategic planning, and more. 

What all these uses (and the many more that are bringing new life to many professions) have in common is that they leverage AI’s core strengths to reduce manual work and take analytic and strategic work to a new level. Part of the value AI brings to both of these advantages is identifying and reducing errors.

Errors plague both daily and wider scope work, and identifying and preventing them is key to ensuring that analyses, plans and decisions taken are based on accurate understanding and information. AI for financial planning and analysis, as in other areas, can make a big difference in identifying, reducing and preventing errors. There are a number of ways it does this effectively, which we’ll explore in this article.

Identify Errors Right Away

With Anthropic’s top three uses, the fact that AI can help identify errors straight away is an obvious advantage. If you’re writing, a tool that picks out the mistakes that spellcheck misses is very valuable, and a similar thing is true for when you’re writing code. AI can also help by flagging when you’ve missed a crucial step “on paper” because it’s so clear in your head.

Why AI for Financial Planning and Analysis? 

It’s the same when it comes to AI for financial planning and analysis. No one knows better than a financial professional how easy it is to copy a cell into the wrong place, or drop a digit, or put in a comma or period incorrectly. AI can flag that for you in real time, so that you don’t end up chasing down an issue weeks later and having to fix all its knock on effects. 

Similarly, if one department has submitted its budget plan, or end of quarter results, or monthly updates, with mistakes, AI can catch that right away before problems in the materials you’ve received cause trouble downstream.

Avoid Manual Errors

Financial planning and analysis used to be a heavily manual process, largely based around spreadsheets. That burdened teams with huge pressure to copy, correlate and combine data correctly, even when they were operating under time constraints. 

Why AI for Financial Planning and Analysis? 

Today’s businesses work in a complex and fast-changing environment with a huge number of factors in play at any given time. It’s not practical to expect financial processes to rely on manual processes as they did in the past. It’s also a waste of financial professionals’ time, because there is so much more they could be doing, while AI can handle the data management side of things more efficiently and without errors.

Computers simply don’t make the same sorts of mistakes that creep in through manual work. They can’t be distracted, or stressed out, or juggling too many spreadsheets at once. In this sense using AI for financial planning and analysis is simply a better fit.

Assess the Past

We all make mistakes. Sometimes, they pass almost unnoticed. Sometimes they have ramifications later on. Regardless, you want to make sure they’re prevented from recurring in the future. With AI, it’s much easier to find the patterns and then work out how to change them. 

For instance, with the Defense Counterintelligence use case, AI is the obvious way to review the data and determine how the mistakes of the past came about. If there are specific breakdowns in communication, or missing pieces of information, or times of the year, that are especially implicated in causing trouble, then those are the places to focus on to fix, to avoid issues in future.

Why AI for Financial Planning and Analysis? 

Planning and analysis are specifically areas where this kind of ability is most valuable. No one’s predictions and recommendations are perfect, but often there are particular weaknesses in processes, organizational structures, or the data being used that result in the most notable cases of failure. 

With AI, you can assess the past. Thanks to human intelligence, you can make sure you learn from it.

Don’t Miss a Red Flag

As the Defence Counterintelligence director put it, they’ve found AI most valuable helping to prioritize existing threats. In other words, there’s a world of noise hitting your platforms, and AI helps bring order to it, and make sure you don’t miss the things that are most important.

Why AI for Financial Planning and Analysis? 

This factor is just as relevant for financial professionals. There’s so much information that teams need to work with, both internal and external, and it’s easy for things to get lost in the storm. 

You can use AI to flag things like invoices that are going unpaid for too long, or suppliers who have suddenly become unreliable causing impact across your business, or shifts in the market or supply chain, or results from a team that are well below expected KPIs.

Then, you can raise a flag when it matters, find out what’s going on, and strategize on the best ways forward – all before it becomes a real problem.

Break Down Silos

Information silos are inevitable, and their impact becomes greater the faster a company moves or the more it grows. AI helps to manage and mitigate this business challenge. If you can use centralized platforms to gather and consolidate data, the business can become aligned without any additional communication or calculation overhead.

Why AI for Financial Planning and Analysis? 

Firmbase’s AI-first platform makes AI open to everyone, because no coding ability of any kind is required to build models, create budgets or forecasts, or request summaries or key metrics from an FP&A AI agent.

This takes financial planning and analysis to a whole new level, making it coherent and coordinated across an entire organization and empowering everyone to interrogate and explore the data and possible scenarios. 

Include More Information

The more you know, the more you know. Humans have a natural limitation in the number of factors they can handle processing for analysis – but machines don’t. AI can give you the ability to work with far more data, from far more sources, without a pause. It’s an accuracy power up. 

The caveat, of course, is that you need to input the right information, since it’s a “garbage in, garbage out” type situation. Fortunately, financial professionals are expert at determining which data sources really are relevant and ensuring details such as shared definitions and consistent metrics are employed. 

Why AI for Financial Planning and Analysis? 

Financial planning and analysis is well known as an area that requires a broad, deep understanding to be effective. From areas as diverse as BvA to compliance to business strategy to workforce planning and much more, there’s a huge amount to take into account.

AI transforms this from being a struggle into being an asset. Once a platform such as Firmbase’s is integrated with the desired data sources (which is itself easy and fast to set up) the machine does the heavy lifting of sifting and analyzing the data, leaving the people to ask the important questions about what it means for their business. 

AI for Financial Planning and Analysis

AI is everywhere now, and it can be enormously effective in empowering many industries. In financial planning and analysis, one of its great strengths is allowing teams to identify and avoid errors which can otherwise have serious consequences in terms of accuracy and impact. 

Bringing Ai to financial planning and analysis means that errors can be discovered and prevented in real time, making analyses and recommendations more precise. Errors in judgment rather than transcription can also be avoided by increasing the amount of relevant data used as inputs, breaking down silos, ensuring important factors are highlighted and making it easier to learn from the past. 

Financial teams who incorporate AI can begin to use their time far more effectively, for work that only human intelligence can handle. Working with Firmbase, they can free up as much as 80% of their time to focus on strategic work. Identifying the way to get that much time and flexibility back, and not taking it, is an error that’s definitely worth avoiding.