ICAEW details GenAI role in streamlining financial close procedures
November 6, 2025
ICAEW’s GenAI education programme addresses financial operations with a specific focus on period-end close activities.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) has identified generative AI (GenAI) as a means for finance professionals to speed up routine tasks, freeing up time for interpretation, decision-making, and other value-driven activities.
A newly introduced course within ICAEW’s GenAI programme, launched at the end of September, addresses financial operations with a specific focus on period-end close activities.
The course delivers practical instructions alongside real-life scenarios, showing how GenAI might be incorporated into different stages of period-end close.
ICAEW GenFinance.AI director Peter Beard said: “GenAI is transforming our work by converting many manual tasks into more efficient, semi-automated workflows, enabling much faster preparation and review.
“Period-end close has long been associated with late nights, repetitive reconciliations and a heavy reliance on spreadsheets. GenAI promises to ease the burden at four key stages of the process as we outline in our GenAI Accelerator Programme.”
In case of economic transactions such as a sale or purchase, financial teams had to traditionally sift through PDFs, emails and documents to ascertain which event should be recorded in the accounts.
With GenAI, these materials can be automatically scanned and summarised, with potential classifications suggested based on content.
Recording these transactions in the ledger has also been a manual process, often requiring accountants to interpret agreements before making the necessary entries.
By describing a transaction in plain language to a GenAI system, practitioners can now receive draft journal entries that conform to accounting standards.
Verification steps such as reconciliations for bank accounts or control accounts historically involved comparing statements line by line or using spreadsheets for complex calculations.
With GenAI, practitioners are able to upload relevant data sets, allowing the technology to match items, highlight discrepancies, and spot missing transactions.
The process concludes with reporting responsibilities. GenAI tools can now assist by checking balances for errors and providing summaries by department or cost centre. Narrative commentaries explaining financial results can also be drafted automatically, saving time previously spent on manual compilation.
[The Accountant Online]
