12 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Accounting Automation and Efficiency

According to CNBC, the generative AI tool ChatGPT has over 400 million users as of February 2025, based on its interview with OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap. 

This article identifies several uses of ChatGPT in accounting that may improve your business productivity. You can perform accounting tasks, brainstorm, research, analyze financial information for insights and decision-making, and gain digital assistance in business communications with human oversight. You can also read our ChatGPT for finance article. 

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a generative AI large language model (LLM) from the company OpenAI for conversational AI chats with inputs and outputs or uses as an automated AI tool. ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP) and a transformer multi-layered deep learning neural network (part of the machine learning subset of artificial intelligence). 

With ChatGPT, a user enters prompts or questions to generate human-like text, images, audio, or other output from ChatGPT when it answers questions as conversational AI. Software apps can access ChatGPT through API integration to add ChatGPT functionality to computer programs.

Current Limitations of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is only as good as its inputs, as determined by your level of prompt engineering skills. ChatGPT isn’t fully perfected yet, requiring human judgment, fact-checking, and modifications to its output through iterative refinement of input questions, prompts, and data, including context, tone, and style. You shouldn’t enter sensitive information into ChatGPT, as OpenAI warns, because privacy and security are an issue. 

Through the first quarter of 2025, ChatGPT has only trained on vast amounts of Internet, books, and other training data through September 30, 2023, for GPT-4o and November 30, 2023, for GPT-4 models. It’s possible to use the Internet “search” and “research” modes in ChatGPT or add narrow segments of current relevant Internet information as a prompt in GPT to provide more recent information. Some of the newer features require higher paid SaaS subscription plan levels. 

How to Effectively Use ChatGPT for Accounting

Although this list isn’t all-inclusive, here are 12 ways to consider how ChatGPT can be effectively used by human accountants in accounting. 

12 ways to use ChatGPT for accounting are:

1. Invoice processing
2. Coding expenses
3. Data cleansing
4. Formatting output 
5. Report narratives and notes
6. Generating computer code 
7. Data analysis for decision-making
8. Business plan and pitch deck research 
9. Preliminary financial forecasts and budgets
10. Audits 
11. Tax and legislation compliance research 
12. Business communications and brainstorming

Some of these practical ChatGPT accounting ideas are from these two YouTube videos by Hector Garcia, CPA: “ChatGPT for Accountants 101 & Practical Examples” and “Advanced ChatGPT Concepts for Accountants.”  If you view these videos, you’ll see a hands-on demo of how to use ChatGPT for accounting in an accounting practice or by accountants in a business industry.

Other ideas are from Tipalti’s adoption of embedded ChatGPT-4 features in its AP automation software for automated invoice processing and data analysis, applying artificial intelligence in accounts payable. Using ChatGPT embedded accounting features, including automated general ledger account coding, streamlines workflows, increases efficiency for accounting processes and analysis, and reduces human errors. 

Tipalti’s Ask Tipalti AI^SM Feature Example

Ask Tipalti AI^SM (Ask Pi) is an AI-powered digital assistant that allows customers to easily access information and answer key business questions instantly, saving time and resources.

Combining AI-driven payables and finance automation software with ChatGPT may be the best solution for achieving productivity gains in some ChatGPT accounting use cases.

1) Invoice Processing

You may be able to use ChatGPT alone for some aspects of invoice processing, like coding expenses. But it’s less efficient or accurate than using Tipalti AP automation software with ChatGPT features. 

Tipalti’s AP automation software for end-to-end payables and automated invoice processing, including global payments, incorporates useful ChatGPT features. Within invoice processing, these ChatGPT features enhance account coding prediction for auto-coding and improve purchase order matching. They also enhance Tipalti’s Ask PI, an AI-driven digital assistant. Tipalti is an add-on software that integrates with your ERP or accounting software. 

2) Coding Expenses 

Again, ChatGPT alone lets you try to properly code accounting expenses to the correct account in your chart of accounts. But it’s not that accurate, and it may take you several tries to get it right. 

Instead, use Tipalti AP automation software with built-in ChatGPT and AI-based automatic coding features for supplier invoices in accounts payable. You can combine Tipalti AP software with Tipalti Expenses to gain employee expense reimbursement functionality with account coding of expenses. Tipalti accounting automation is a digital transformation that eliminates manual data entry and paper documents and helps you support your employees.

Tipalti uses robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive tasks. The Tipalti software uses thousands of algorithmic rules for detecting exceptions in digitally captured supplier invoice data prior to payment. Tipalti AP automation software eliminates time-consuming paper and manual processes. This additional functionality will help your company be more efficient, reduce payment errors by 66%, strengthen financial controls, reduce fraud risk, and achieve cost savings. Tipalti saves you 80% of the time for completing your payables processes, and its ChatGPT features add efficiency. 

3) Data Cleansing

ChatGPT can be used to clean accounting data, such as customer names, to remove unnecessary characters, such as numbers, and eliminate duplicate names in spreadsheets or the customer master file of your accounting software. Before migrating data to a new software system, it’s essential to use clean data. 

4) Formatting Output

If you don’t like the way that your accounting software or ERP system formats financial statements or reports, you can reformat them using ChatGPT file inputs and prompts. Besides financial statements and reports, you can use ChatGPT for formatting tables and generating CSV files (for imports or other uses in spreadsheets or computer software programs). ChatGPT can sort data. 

Currently, ChatGPT, which uses natural language processing (NLP) in a large language model (LLM) isn’t sophisticated or accurate enough to produce the financial statements from transactions alone as output. Your accounting software or ERP system is designed for this purpose. 

5) Report Narratives and Notes

Use ChatGPT to add narratives, notes, and visualizations to financial reports and statements. It can also analyze significant increases or decreases in account balances on the balance sheet or income statement revenue, expenses, and profitability for comparative accounting periods.

ChatGPT can add suggestions for improving profitability in less formal or internal reports. You can specify to ChatGPT whether you want a short answer or a longer answer within a specified number of characters.

If you use ChatGPT to prepare formal Notes to Financial Statements in accordance with GAAP or other accounting standards, you must fact-check them and ensure that you supplement the information (provided to ChatGPT as input) to include the latest applicable GAAP standards (or IFRS standards, if applicable).

As a public company CFO, you and the CEO have an investor relations and financial analyst liaison role. This role includes planning and participating in quarterly conference calls when financial results are released and discussed. ChatGPT can help you analyze your business and financial results and prepare conference call scripts. You can also ask ChatGPT questions that may help you prepare for anticipated questions from participating financial analysts before the conference call. 

6) Generating Computer Code

ChatGPT creates computer code in the computer language that you specify. For example, you can ask it to create JavaScript, Python, R, or Excel macro code, and Excel spreadsheet formulas for a particular purpose. If the code isn’t working or needs revision due to errors or other reasons, you can ask ChatGPT to revise the code based on the problems that you’re encountering. After ChatGPT creates the code, copy and paste it into the application where it’s needed and follow any extra steps to accomplish your purpose. 

7) Data Analysis for Decision-Making

ChatGPT can analyze financial data and accounting information to detect suspected anomalies in trends, amounts, or percentage changes requiring further analysis. You can use this insightful information for decision-making. For example, a ChatGPT financial analysis may point out opportunities for operational improvements resulting in cost reductions that would improve business profitability. 

With Tipalti’s built-in ChatGPT features, you can use its digital assistant, Ask Tipalti AI^SM(formerly Ask Pi), to help your business get real-time financial data insights and spend analysis. 

8) Business Plan and Pitch Deck Research

You’ll need extensive research to prepare a business plan document or a related pitch deck. ChatGPT can perform preliminary research that you’ll fact-check. Remember to provide up-to-date information updates to ChatGPT as input with adequate, prompt engineering and consider using Search and Deep Research features. ChatGPT can’t currently prepare PowerPoint presentations, but it can help you brainstorm ideas and generate some text or images for your presentation. ChatGPT Pro users have access to ChatGPT’s Deep Research functionality. 

9) Preliminary Financial Forecasts and Budgets

ChatGPT can be used to make preliminary demand predictions, financial forecasts, and budgets. But it’s not accurate enough to do this on its own. You can use your judgment and information to adjust and improve these very preliminary financial forecasts and budgets. 

10) Audits

An analytical review is one process used in external audits by CPA firms to look for anomalies in changes in financial data. ChatGPT can help analyze financial data as an auditing aid. You may be aware of other ChatGPT applications in an audit. As audit automation programs incorporate ChatGPT through the API connection, using ChatGPT features will become easier and more productive in the audit use case for public accounting firms. 

Clients often prepare and provide auditors with general ledger account reconciliation schedules to lessen audit fees. ChatGPT may help business accounting professionals from the company under audit prepare these schedules.

11) Tax and Legislation Compliance Research

Although ChatGPT isn’t currently ready to prepare accurate tax returns, it helps do tax research. If legislation, such as a tax law or another type of government legislation, is introduced or already effective, you can use ChatGPT to summarize the legislation. This legislation analysis process may require using the ChatGPT Search feature for Internet searches or a PDF document with the legislation content as input for ChatGPT if it falls within the file size limits for attachments. 

12) Business Communications and Brainstorming

You can use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and to create emails, reports, and other business communications. Give ChatGPT prompts about your writing style, context, tone, and other information required. Check each suggested content communication for accuracy and ask for revisions to improve it. You can also use an editing bot to make the content more concise or detect changes that would improve the content. 

CPAs in the public practice of the accounting industry can use ChatGPT for client services and practice management. Business accountants can use ChatGPT in their departmental or financial management roles. 

If you don’t use ChatGPT directly for creating or editing business communications, note that GrammarlyGO is an AI tool using ChatGPT that the software company Grammarly introduced in 2023. You may find other applications that are also ready to use for business communications. 

Recent ChatGPT Features

In the last few years, OpenAI has added these ChatGPT features:

• GPT-4 Release (March 2023): Introduced multimodal capabilities, allowing both text and image inputs. With the release of GPT-4, users can upload attachments such as files through the ChatGPT user interface. The attachments have file size limitations and are limited to 20 files per custom GPT, although you may find ways to give ChatGPT access to additional project files. 
• Plugin Support (March 2023): Enabled integration with third-party services, expanding ChatGPT’s functionality.
• Code Interpreter (July 2023): Provided data analysis, code execution, and file handling within the chat interface. This Assistant Code Interpreter feature will be sunsetted in mid-2026 when its features are fully incorporated into the Responses API in ChatGPT.
• Voice and Image Interaction (September 2023): This feature allowed users to engage with ChatGPT using voice and image inputs.
• DALL·E 3 Integration (October 2023): Enabled image generation based on user prompts within ChatGPT.
• GPT-4 Turbo (November 2023): Offered a faster and more cost-effective version of GPT-4 with an expanded context window. 
• GPT-4o (“Omni”) Release (May 2024 with March 2025 update): Enhanced multimodal interactions, including real-time processing of text, audio, and images. GPT-4o is faster than GPT-4 Turbo and better understands vision and audio. With the March 2025 update, the GPT-4o model follows instructions more accurately, provides more concise responses, and handles coding and other tasks better. 
• o1 Model Introduction (September 2024): Focused on advanced reasoning abilities, improving performance in complex problem-solving tasks.
• Search (October 2024): Introduced the ability to use ChatGPT to search the Internet for more recent information beyond the ending knowledge date from the model training data. ChatGPT Search includes links to web sources. Effective February 2025, the Search feature is available to all ChatGPT users. 
• Operator (January 2025): Launched an AI agent capable of autonomous decision-making and task execution, such as browsing the internet and performing transactions. This feature is available for ChatGPT Pro users and will be rolled out to other plans. 
• Deep Research Tool (February 2025): We released a feature that provides comprehensive research reports and delivers detailed insights within 5 to 30 minutes. Deep Research is an agent-based reasoning tool. This feature is initially available for ChatGPT Pro users and will be rolled out to Plus and Team next.
• GPT-4.5 Launch (February 2025): Introduced a model with enhanced emotional intelligence, improved accuracy, and reduced hallucinations, offering more human-like interactions. This Chat GPT 4.5 model scales unsupervised learning. The research preview of the GPT-4.5 model is initially available to Pro users. 

According to TechCrunch, OpenAI plans to release an open model in mid-2025 with “reasoning” abilities similar to those of OpenAI’s o3-mini.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Future of AI and Accounting

AI accounting is part of the present and future of accounting and digital transformation for the accounting profession. The impact that ChatGPT will have on accounting is immense. In the future, AI models, including ChatGPT, will be added as embedded features in even more software programs, and new, reliable use cases will be discovered. 

For example, on June 29, 2023, Intuit established a partnership with OpenAI to use ChatGPT-3.5 and GPT-4 combined with its proprietary GenOS large language model (LLM) in its software products and Fintech businesses “to rapidly build secure, intelligent, personalized GenAI-powered experiences.” Intuit owns TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. As ChatGPT evolves, Intuit will implement later models. ChatGPT in Intuit software may eventually be used as part of the technology to prepare financial statements and tax returns.

Automation is Finance’s greatest asset. AI and ChatGPT are already being used in automation software for accounting and finance, where Tipalti is at the forefront of change, letting you future-proof your business as it scales with growth. Download our eBook, “The Human Impact of Digital Transformation in Your Finance Department.”