AI for accounting reports

The module AI for Accounting Reports adds an assistant to the financial reports. It explains a report in plain language, points out trends and anomalies, and can run a second, independent check of its own findings with two AI agents. It never changes any accounting data.

Analyse a report

  1. Open a report wizard, for example profit and loss, balance sheet, trial balance, general ledger, partner ledger, aged partner balance, tax report or journal audit, and set the dates and options as you normally would.

  2. Click Analyse with AI next to the usual print button (accountants only). You land on a new analysis. The analysis runs in the background; the form shows its progress and you are notified when it is done.

  3. Read the result on the tab Analysis. The tab Report data shows the rows the AI was given. Use Analyse again to run it again.

All analyses are listed in Accounting ‣ Reporting ‣ AI Report Analyses. You see your own analyses; accounting managers see those of the company. Each analysis has its own chatter.

What the AI is given

  • The AI works from the report’s own computed rows, the same figures you could print, calculated in your environment with your access rights. No PDF is read. Each row gets a reference (R1, R2, and so on) so that findings can point to their evidence.

  • For financial reports and the trial balance with two dates and no comparison chosen, the same report is also computed for the previous period of the same length, so the AI can describe trends.

  • Key figures such as current ratio, quick ratio, debt to equity, margins, net result and income growth are calculated by the program, not by the AI. The AI only explains them. They are approximations from the account lines of the report, and a report without account detail gives none.

  • A report is limited to 400 rows. A large general ledger is reduced to account totals plus the 25 largest items of the period, and the text given to the AI is capped.

Audit with an auditor and a reviewer

On an analysis, click Audit with AI agents for a more careful check. It also runs in the background.

  1. The agent Financial Auditor proposes up to eight findings, each citing the report rows as evidence and, where relevant, an amount.

  2. It hands them to a second agent, Financial Reviewer, which looks the rows up and confirms or rejects every finding.

  3. The program then checks the evidence itself: a finding stays Confirmed only if the reviewer confirmed it, every row it cites exists and its amount (if any) is found in the cited rows within 0.5 percent. Findings that were not reviewed or are not supported are kept as rejected, with the reason, so nothing is hidden.

The result is the tab Audit with a summary, the Confirmed findings and the Rejected findings with their severity, evidence and verdict, plus a note in the chatter that lists the confirmed findings. Click Open audit in AI panel to read or continue the conversation with the auditor in the AI panel (see The AI panel). The panel can also look up the report rows while the analysis is open, and two quick prompts are offered: Explain this report and What should I check first?.

Safety and requirements

  • Read-only: the two agents have only the Ask capability and no tools that read or write records. The only things written are the analysis and its findings, the AI conversation and the logs. Journal entries and other accounting data stay unchanged.

  • Before anything is sent, the program checks that a model is configured, that you have the Ask and Read capabilities, and that the AI read policy allows journal items and accounts (see Access policy). If not, you get a plain message and no strike is recorded.

  • The agents are available to accountants only. Their names are translatable, so they follow the language of the user.

  • Reports of the optional cash book, bank book and day book modules have their own wizards and are not covered.

Note for administrators: background jobs and time limits

An audit makes several model calls and easily takes longer than an ordinary web request is allowed to run. That is why analyses and audits run as background jobs of the scheduled action “AI: Run accounting report analyses and audits”. The job runs in the environment of the person who clicked, never in the identity of the scheduler, and the form refreshes by itself. A job that stays in the running state for more than 30 minutes is marked as failed with the message “The AI job was interrupted. Start it again.”, so nothing stays stuck.

Important

The time a background job may run comes from the server option limit_time_real_cron when it is set to a positive value, otherwise from limit_time_real, and otherwise from Odoo’s default. If audits fail with a timeout, raise limit_time_real_cron in the server configuration file (for example to 900 seconds) and restart the server. The value 0 is not treated as “no limit”.

If the model does not answer within the time that is left, the analysis or audit ends as failed with the message “The AI model did not answer in time. Try again later, or ask for something shorter or narrower.” The message is shown on the analysis, posted in its chatter and sent to you as a notification.