Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6 (claude.com)
116 points by da_grift_shift 5 hours ago
typpo 4 hours ago
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/
someuser54541 34 minutes ago
I feel like I'd be really skeptical of results from a non-deterministic model for something as precise as accounting....
dr_dshiv 23 minutes ago
Yeah, seriously, I use AI all day every day but that terrifies me.
belter 4 hours ago
Dont use Excel for accounting....
tomjakubowski 3 hours ago
An Excel spreadsheet is a bad source of truth for data. It's fine for analytics though.
belter an hour ago
HN ignorance on 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...
Just a reminder that an accountant who might say "I use Currency format" is still working in binary floating point as the format is just used as a display mask. And using VBA macros with the Currency type will hit problems at the boundary, when values move between the worksheet and the macro. The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...
"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
sdf2erf 3 hours ago
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?
Pooge 3 hours ago
torginus 2 hours ago
belter 2 hours ago
_se 3 hours ago
bdangubic 2 hours ago
this might just be the worst advice I’ve ever read here - well done mate, well done
Havoc an hour ago
And then you hand it to your boss who takes a 20 second look at it and asks why you made a projection that assume massive revenue growth and 3 years of perfectly flat utilities, insurance, G&A - no inflation etc.
It does look really promising as a skeleton starting point though. Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand.
Not unlike the boilerplate start we saw in AI coding a couple years back
bovermyer 4 hours ago
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.
warabe 4 hours ago
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...
Ntrails an hour ago
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...
sdf2erf 4 hours ago
I wouldnt worry. Unless you are just memorising stuff and dont actually understand anything - then you should.
eggsby 4 hours ago
Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:
henning 2 hours ago
Their chart only goes up to 70.
layer8 an hour ago
At least it starts at zero.
behnamoh 4 hours ago
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".