Using AI to Debug My Monthly Accounts

My accounting system produces all the nice numbers, tables, and graphs you see on this blog as well as our tax returns etc. But it is a complicated web of interlinked Excel spreadsheets. Each investment has its own workbook as does each set of monthly accounts and then there are the main sheets that consolidate all those numbers. It gradually grew, though I have done some major reforms to make things work better now and then. But there are always errors in the monthly accounts, which I mostly can track down quite easily and fix, but some are very hard to find.

So, I just started a free one month trial of Microsoft Office to see whether using Copilot inside Excel can find the elusive bugs. My former employer where I am now an emeritus faculty member doesn't support this function in Office.

The goal was to fix discrepancies of around AUD 4k in the September accounts. I had to open around 35 files simultaneously so Copilot could see everything relevant that was linked. And then a dialogue ensued that took an hour or two. It quickly began to understand quite well what was going on in the system. It then got convinced it was an error in my transfers to Angellist of USD 3k. We went through step by step why that wasn't the case. I had to give it a lot of explanations of why it was wrong. Then it found the first genuine error–a transfer of AUD 10k to USD 7k-ish was missing from the sheet that calculates intramonth forex gains or losses (i.e. due to conversions between currencies during the month). But that didn't explain many dollars.

But once that was out of the way it only took us another 11 minutes to find the main error. I had written down a transfer of almost USD 3k out of the SMSF's Interactive Brokers account that went nowhere. Originally, this was a conversion from USD to CAD to buy Defi Technologies shares in Canada. But as there were a lot of transactions, I later consolidated all of them into one line. But I forgot to delete that number!

There is still an error of around $5. It's not worth tracking that down, though it might be fun 😀. 

Maybe this is worth paying for (AUD 150 per year). Clearly though this kind of tool only can work as a "co-pilot" with an expert on the system under investigation. 

Also, I wonder why I still calculate the monthly reconciliation for non-retirement accounts, which was one point of confusion for the AI. One of the things it thought might be an error was my pension from Unisuper, which appears to come out of nowhere. It would be simpler to just do it for all accounts.