Best ChatGPT prompts for finance and accounting

Play video0:48

Getting started with AI in accounting

OpenAI's accounting team leverages ChatGPT to automate complex financial tasks. Sowmya, OpenAI's former controller, created this "crawl, walk, run" video to help you get started with AI in accounting.

Crawl: Revenue recognition

With ChatGPT, you can upload contracts and accounting guidelines with the prompt, "Use your 606 knowledge and the attached guide, and document the 606 conclusions for this order form." This generates comprehensive five-step model documentation with cited sources, extracted contract terms in table format, and automated calculations — creating audit-ready documentation with clear sourcing.

Walk: Merging large CSVs with Python

For handling large, messy datasets, first upload your column headers rather than the entire file. With prompts that start with, "Can you write a python script that does the following," you can generate custom code to filter, categorize, and analyze your financial data. By testing the code on familiar files and including catch-all instructions for unmapped values, you ensure data integrity while processing vast amounts of data with ease.

Run: Automating journal entries with a GPT

Create a custom GPT to fully automate recurring processes like sales tax journal entries. The GPT in this video is specialized to analyze raw transaction data, segregate domestic and foreign tax liabilities, generate properly formatted journal entries with correct debits and credits, and provide downloadable files ready for posting. You should borrow the prompt used in the video to create your own GPT and tweak it to fit your needs.

Start using AI with your team

This multi-tiered approach allows OpenAI's finance team to automate increasingly complex accounting tasks — from guided analysis to custom coding to fully automated specialized tools — creating a progression path for finance professionals to adopt AI at their own pace and comfort level.