ChatGPT is OpenAI’s generative AI assistant, built on large language models (LLMs), and uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and generate text.
This guide focuses on the 14 best ways to use ChatGPT in finance to reduce time-consuming manual tasks, conduct in-depth research, and analyze data for informed decision-making.
Can ChatGPT Be Used in Finance?
Yes, ChatGPT can be used in finance to support financial management. It’s an AI chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs).
ChatGPT for finance is useful to finance professionals because it can handle complex queries and analyze large datasets. ChatGPT for finance use cases include data analysis, cash flow projections, financial report creation, and informed financial decision-making for mergers and acquisitions (M&A), investments, and financing.
It can be a powerful tool for completing financial workflows, including accounts payable, procurement, expense tracking, and budgets. However, outputs still need human review before they inform decisions.
ChatGPT vs. Finance AI Agents
ChatGPT and finance AI agents can both help finance teams work more efficiently, but they serve different purposes. ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI assistant that helps professionals research, analyze data, create content, and answer questions through natural-language prompts.
Finance AI agents, by contrast, are designed to perform specialized tasks within financial workflows. Depending on their role, they can take action within financial workflows—such as processing invoices, matching purchase orders, or routing approvals—within defined business rules, controls, and human oversight.
For finance teams, this means ChatGPT can be valuable for knowledge work and decision support, while purpose-built AI agents can help execute and automate financial processes.
Key Takeaways
- ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI assistant, is a valuable financial tool.
- Financial professionals in business, including CPAs, fintech professionals, and those in the financial services industry (banking and investing), use ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT can be embedded in financial automation software to improve efficiency and provide additional insights.
- ChatGPT is useful for financial analysis, business research reports, cash flow forecasting, M&A transactions, and business communications.
- Recent updates, including deep research and ChatGPT for Financial Services, support in-depth research, cited reports, and real-time voice conversations.
How Finance Teams Can Use ChatGPT
The 14 financial GPT real-world use cases for business finance teams are:
- Financial analysis and decision support
- Expense management and budgets
- Working with spreadsheets and generating code
- Cash flow projections
- Researching financing and investment products
- Researching economic and industry trends with financial impacts
- Preparing preliminary research reports
- M&A and corporate development
- Researching tax and globalization strategies
- Creating conference call scripts for investor relations
- Creating ESG goals and reports
- Preparing financial analysis reports for the Board of Directors
- Business communications
- Standardizing finance workflows
1. Financial Analysis and Decision Support
ChatGPT can analyze financial data, including expenses and financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement). Not surprisingly, data analytics is the top AI focus area for financial services institutions, according to NVIDIA’s 2026 survey titled State of AI in Financial Services.
ChatGPT can help identify potential anomalies in financial data for human investigation.
Example prompt: “Compare this quarter’s actuals to budget, rank the five largest variances, and suggest a likely driver for each based on the data provided.”
Finance should verify any financial analysis ChatGPT creates. Once finance fact-checks and refines the ChatGPT output, it can inform recommendations and decisions within the company.
ChatGPT may be used in this way to strengthen decision-making and optimize operational efficiency, growth strategies, and profitability.
2. Expense Management and Budgets
Finance and accounting teams can use ChatGPT to track business-related employee expenses and manage budgets by analyzing spend.
According to OpenAI, finance teams can use ChatGPT to “compare actual results with plan, identify material differences, summarize likely drivers, and prepare a clear finance update that decision-makers can review.”
ChatGPT helps analyze budget variance and identify drivers
Source: OpenAI
Purpose-built tools apply AI directly to this work. For example, Tipalti’s Expense Receipt Scan Agent extracts receipt data to speed up expense reports, and the Tipalti AI Assistant lets finance teams ask questions about their AP data in plain language.
Learn more about artificial intelligence in accounts payable.
3. Working with Spreadsheets and Generating Code
Finance and accounting professionals can use ChatGPT to work with spreadsheets, including Excel and Google Sheets. ChatGPT can help build and update financial models, create and explain formulas, analyze spreadsheet data, run scenarios, and identify trends or inconsistencies.
For more complex analysis, ChatGPT can also generate and run code to perform calculations, transform data, conduct statistical analysis, and support financial modeling. For example, finance teams can use these capabilities to analyze budget variances, model cash flow and revenue forecasts, or explore different financial scenarios.
Finance professionals should review formulas, calculations, and model assumptions before relying on the results, particularly for complex financial models or consequential decisions.
4. Cash Flow Projections
ChatGPT can help the finance department prepare cash flow projections in financial modeling.
By providing accurate inputs on cash flow, model constraints, and relevant economic/industry information, finance teams can ask ChatGPT to create an editable cash forecasting workbook.
Example prompt: “Build a 13-week cash forecast from these AR, AP, and payroll inputs and flag any week below our $X minimum cash balance.”
ChatGPT can present information, such as a summary view, the minimum ending cash balance, cash pressure drivers, and flags for a low liquidity point or any breach of the safety cash threshold.
Cash forecasting with ChatGPT works best for teams:
- Building a 13-week or monthly cash forecast
- Requiring receipts, payroll, vendor payments, and working-capital assumptions in one workbook
- Reviewing runway, safety-balance breaches, and scenario drivers before a planning meeting
Finance and accounting professionals must ensure the reliability of these projected amounts, drawing on their experience with cash flow projections, and refine them to produce better cash flow predictions.
5. Researching Financing and Investment Products
ChatGPT can help CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) and treasurers discover and assess financing and investment products and prepare a comparison report.
Here are some ways ChatGPT can guide investment decisions:
- Analyze market opportunities, competitors, and growth potential
- Analyze analyst reports and changing market expectations
- Prioritize capital allocation and strategic investment decisions
For time-sensitive financing or investment research, use current web or connected data sources and verify rates, terms, and product availability before making decisions.
6. Researching Economic and Industry Trends with Financial Impacts
ChatGPT can help research and analyze past and current data when you turn on web search or upload current reports on economic and industry trends.
Your ChatGPT research on economic and industry trends will provide information on market data, market trends, economic factors, and potential risks.
With this information, you can gauge the financial impact on your business and respond with proposed actions and business decisions.
You can also apply this information to the stock market and potential impacts on your company’s and other companies’ stock prices. The stock price application would be useful if your company is publicly traded, is considering acquisitions, is researching competitors, or is an investment firm.
7. Preparing Preliminary Research Reports
ChatGPT deep research can conduct multi-step research across the web, connected sources, and uploaded information to produce cited research reports.
To get more accurate results, OpenAI recommends connecting trusted industry-standard sources (such as PitchBook and FactSet) and adding enterprise data. Deep research prioritizes these sources over general web results.
Finance teams can enhance the accuracy of these research reports through human review and fact-checking to overcome ChatGPT’s inherent limitations.
8. M&A and Corporate Development
With ChatGPT, you can research target industries, competitors, and M&A candidates. You can also research valuation techniques used in the industry.
ChatGPT can summarize diligence findings, identify material risks, and screen acquisition targets against strategic investment criteria.
After completing the research, you can generate a preliminary report to be finalized by a human member of the corporate development or finance team.
9. Researching Tax and Globalization Strategies
As the CFO or a tax professional in a corporation, you’re responsible for optimizing financial performance.
Tax implications of domestic and international expansion strategies and changes in tax laws will impact financial results. ChatGPT can summarize tax rules and draft research memos, but verify every rate, threshold, and filing rule against official sources and your tax advisor before acting on it.
10. Creating Conference Call Scripts for Investor Relations
Investor relations (IR) teams are using AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to summarize content and generate reports.
CFOs and IR teams can also use ChatGPT to:
- Generate responses to frequently asked questions: ChatGPT can work from uploaded investor communications, such as earnings call transcripts and investor presentations, to generate answers to frequently asked questions.
- Generate earnings call scripts: ChatGPT could assist with drafting earnings call scripts by generating text based on inputs such as financial results and company guidance.
- Simulate investor conversations: ChatGPT can use transcripts of previous investor conversations to simulate similar conversations. This could help IR professionals practice and prepare for upcoming meetings or earnings calls.
- Assess market sentiment: ChatGPT can review news articles, analyst reports, and social media posts to analyze and assess market sentiment.
11. Creating ESG Goals and Reports
With growing emphasis on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and sustainability disclosure reporting, large businesses with multiple subsidiaries face reporting requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
ChatGPT can draft disclosure narratives from approved data, map metrics to reporting frameworks, and flag gaps across subsidiaries, with sustainability and legal teams reviewing final figures.
ChatGPT is a useful tool for finance and accounting departments responsible for preparing these ESG disclosures and reports.
12. Preparing Financial Analysis Reports for the Board of Directors
To become a trusted CFO, you must have the respect of your company’s Board of Directors. One way to earn their respect is to become a strategic CFO who presents valuable information and financial analysis to the board in easy-to-digest formats.
As AI in accounting becomes mainstream, finance teams use ChatGPT as a digital assistant to generate preliminary reports from datasets.
Example prompt: “Turn this P&L and KPI summary into a one-page board update highlighting three risks and three requests for board action.”
An added human review layer can enhance accuracy, add value, and create a positive impact.
13. Business Communications
Finance teams use ChatGPT to write emails and prepare other forms of business communications.
For meetings, download the transcript of a recorded video call (e.g., Zoom) and ask ChatGPT to summarize the meeting, identify decisions to make, provide a list of action items, and write an agenda for the next meeting.
Finance professionals can also use meeting platforms integrated with OpenAI’s enterprise APIs to perform these meeting-related tasks.
14. Standardizing Finance Workflows
CFOs and other finance professionals can use ChatGPT to standardize finance workflows by creating consistent formats for financial reports, automating recurring analyses, and standardizing templates for cash, revenue, and expense forecasts.
ChatGPT can also help create KPIs (key performance indicators) and SOPs (standard operating procedures).
Turn ChatGPT Into a Real Tool for Finance Workflows
From automating repetitive tasks to improving financial insights, ChatGPT can enhance day-to-day finance operations. Learn how to apply it strategically across your workflows.
ChatGPT Features for Finance Teams
ChatGPT continues to evolve with advanced reasoning, research, data analysis, coding, and conversational capabilities that can support finance professionals across a range of tasks.
In September 2026, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a version of ChatGPT Work with built-in data from providers such as LSEG, PitchBook, and Daloopa. It’s aimed at investment banking and equity research teams at eligible financial institutions. Other finance teams can use ChatGPT Work plugins to connect business data from tools such as Excel, Snowflake, and Salesforce.
Advanced reasoning capabilities can help finance teams work through complex analyses, financial models, research questions, and other knowledge-intensive tasks. ChatGPT can also work with uploaded files and data to help users analyze information, create reports, perform calculations, and explore financial scenarios.
Deep Research
Deep research is designed for intensive knowledge work in areas such as finance, engineering, policy, and science. It can conduct multi-step research across online information and connected sources, producing research reports with citations.
Finance teams can use trusted sources and company information, where available, to help ground research in relevant financial data rather than relying solely on general web results. Specifying the domain and providing relevant context can also help ChatGPT better understand industry terminology and the purpose of the research.
Finance teams should still review sources, validate calculations and assumptions, and verify material findings before using AI-generated research to inform financial decisions.
Data Analysis and Coding
ChatGPT can help finance professionals analyze uploaded data, perform calculations, identify patterns, create visualizations, and generate or modify code for more complex analytical tasks.
These capabilities can support financial modeling, forecasting, variance analysis, and other data-intensive finance workflows. Finance professionals should review calculations, formulas, and outputs before using them for reporting or decision-making.
Voice
ChatGPT also supports voice conversations, allowing finance professionals to interact with the tool in a conversational way. Voice can be useful for asking questions, exploring ideas, summarizing information, or working through a problem without relying solely on typed prompts.
Pro Tip: Want to go deeper? Read our ChatGPT in accounting guide for a closer look at how ChatGPT works, including its limitations for finance and accounting.
ChatGPT Prompts for Finance: Examples and Best Practices
Finance professionals can use ChatGPT prompts for tasks ranging from financial analysis and research to forecasting, due diligence, and business communications. The most effective prompts provide relevant context, specify the task or question, and describe the desired output.
ChatGPT Search Example Prompt
ChatGPT Search can help finance professionals find up-to-date information on the web and receive responses with links to sources. This can be useful when researching companies, industries, economic trends, financing options, or potential acquisition targets.
For example, to create a preliminary due diligence checklist for a potential SaaS acquisition, try a prompt such as:
ChatGPT prompt: Create a due diligence checklist for acquiring a SaaS software company. Organize the checklist by financial, operational, commercial, legal, and technology considerations, and identify the financial metrics and potential risks a finance team should investigate.
The image below shows an example of ChatGPT’s response to this finance due diligence prompt.
Results of a sample finance due diligence prompt in ChatGPT
Finance professionals can then use follow-up prompts to refine the results—for example, asking ChatGPT to prioritize financial risks, identify SaaS-specific metrics, or adapt the checklist to a particular company or transaction.
Example Prompt for Financial Statement Analysis
To analyze a financial statement with ChatGPT, choose a company’s financial statement included in a 10-K or other financial report filed with the SEC, or upload your company’s financial statement (as a PDF file input).
You can also copy and paste the financial statement into the message box.
The + button beside Search lets you upload files from your computer or connect ChatGPT to an approved company data source, where available.
Try using a prompt similar to this example prompt as an initial query, along with your company’s detailed financial statement for ChatGPT financial analysis. Then, add queries to obtain additional information about the financial statement, such as requesting anomaly detection.
ChatGPT Prompt: What are the trends in Palantir’s 2023 through 2025 income statements in its 10-K filed with the SEC?
How can your business use AI for finance?
See how Tipalti AI Agents and the AI Assistant help automate invoice capture, coding, approvals, and reporting in AP.
The Pros and Cons of ChatGPT for Finance
ChatGPT can help finance teams work faster across research, analysis, reporting, and communication. However, its outputs still require appropriate controls and human review, particularly when working with sensitive financial data or making consequential decisions.
Pros
- Speeds up research and analysis: ChatGPT can summarize large amounts of information, analyze uploaded data, and help identify trends, anomalies, and key takeaways.
- Supports financial modeling: Finance teams can use ChatGPT to help build forecasts, analyze scenarios, perform calculations, and work with spreadsheets.
- Automates repetitive knowledge work: ChatGPT can draft reports, summarize meetings, create templates, prepare presentations, and standardize recurring finance tasks.
- Makes financial data easier to explore: Natural-language prompts let finance professionals ask questions about data and receive explanations without relying solely on technical queries or manual analysis.
- Supports coding and data analysis: ChatGPT can generate, modify, and run code for tasks such as data transformation, statistical analysis, and financial modeling. Users should, however, test it before running it on company data.
Cons
- Outputs can be inaccurate: ChatGPT can make factual, analytical, or calculation errors, so finance professionals should verify important outputs before relying on them.
- Results depend on the information available: Without access to current, accurate, and relevant business data, ChatGPT may provide incomplete or outdated answers.
- Sensitive data requires appropriate controls: Finance teams should follow company policies for handling confidential financial, customer, supplier, and employee information when using AI tools.
- It doesn’t replace financial judgment: Forecasts, recommendations, and analyses still require review by qualified finance professionals, particularly for high-impact decisions.
- Results can require iteration: The quality of an output depends partly on the instructions, context, and data provided, and complex finance tasks may require multiple prompts and refinements.
Improving Accuracy and Relevance
The key to obtaining more relevant, up-to-date, and accurate results is to provide additional inputs that are specific to the topic. Be sure to use web search, connected sources, or current uploaded data to verify results when freshness matters. Consult financial advisors and other experts as needed for financial planning or investment guidance.
Fact-check, edit, and rewrite ChatGPT-generated content and reports.
Using ChatGPT alone isn’t always efficient, as its effectiveness depends on your prompt-engineering expertise and its reasoning model.
To become proficient with ChatGPT, businesses can point employees to OpenAI Academy’s hands-on lessons and learning paths, including finance-specific guidance.
Addressing Data Privacy Concerns
Data privacy and security are a common AI challenge for finance teams.
While avoiding the sharing of sensitive personal data can help individual ChatGPT users protect their privacy, users on the Free, Plus, and Pro plans can also disable model training by clicking Settings > Data Controls > Improve the model for everyone.
OpenAI specifies that it does not train on inputs and outputs from ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu, or API customers by default.
For sensitive financial information, financial institutions and professionals should follow their company’s data policy and use an approved business environment with appropriate access controls, such as multi-factor authentication, and strengthen privacy, security, and data retention processes.
The Future of ChatGPT and Finance
Applications of ChatGPT for finance will continue to expand and evolve. NVIDIA’s survey shows that 65% of organizations across fintech, consumer finance, and capital markets are actively using AI, with many companies scaling pilots into production.
However, general-purpose AI assistants like ChatGPT are only one way finance teams can apply AI. While ChatGPT can support research, analysis, content creation, and other knowledge work, purpose-built finance AI can apply these capabilities directly within financial workflows.
Finance AI is also evolving toward specialized AI agents designed to perform specific tasks and take action within defined workflows. For example, AI agents can support tasks such as invoice processing, purchase order matching, and approval routing while operating within established business rules, financial controls, and human oversight.
This shift from standalone AI assistance toward AI embedded in financial workflows can help finance teams move beyond generating insights to automating specific processes while maintaining appropriate controls.
IFOL’s 2026 research finds finance teams see AI in accounts payable as a way to “drive efficiency, improve visibility and support more strategic ways of working.”
Beyond ChatGPT: AI-Powered Finance Automation
While ChatGPT can support finance teams with research, analysis, and other knowledge work, purpose-built platforms like Tipalti apply AI directly within financial workflows. Tipalti combines AI-powered capabilities with AP automation to help finance teams reduce manual work, improve visibility, and maintain financial controls.
Tipalti also uses specialized AI agents for tasks across the AP workflow, including invoice capture and coding, PO matching, approval routing, and tax form processing. See how Tipalti AI brings purpose-built AI and automation into finance workflows to help your team work smarter and more efficiently.
