A bookkeeper, who should have known better, didn’t like the profit number on the financial statements that she produced. So, instead of asking the owner or someone like me who knows the financial health of the company, she uploaded these confidential statements into ChatGPT.
ChatGPT’s answer was that the company was bankrupt (which it wasn’t) and that it would not be in business much longer.
This bookkeeper went to all the employees and told them to start looking for other jobs since the company was going out of business.
The owner fired her. The company is still not bankrupt over a year later. She was new, didn’t know the industry, and it was a slower month for revenue.
ChatGPT should NEVER be used to analyze financial statements.
Three reasons why:
First, ChatGPT is a text based large language model and is not good with analyzing numbers.
Second, it doesn’t know the trends of the financials. If the company had a slow month, is this typical for this time period? What did the financials look like a month ago, two months ago, etc.?
Are the trends heading in the right direction?
And most important, third, do you really want to upload confidential financial information into a large language model which makes this information public?
Beware!
If you want to ask ChatGPT about the definition of a term, that’s fine.
If you want to ask ChatGPT to analyze your financial statements – you will probably not get an accurate answer and you’re making your confidential financial information public.
To my knowledge, I am the only person worldwide, with the help of our programming team, who has taught AI to read a small business financial statement – and we didn’t use ChatGPT as our large language model.
Small business statements are messy. No two statements look alike. That’s why it took us more than a year to get it right.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and other large language models are great for many things. They are NOT great for analyzing financial statements. Financially Fit Business, the software we developed is (www.financiallyfit.business).
Want a financial statement review?
Every business, large and small, can benefit from taking a closer look at its numbers. We’re happy to do a quick review – showing you what appears to be good and some areas you might want to pay attention to. (This is where Financially Fit Business can help too). Click here for more information.
And, pass along this offer to your business friends and colleagues who could benefit from this review too!
Ruth King is well known as “The Profitability Master.” She is passionate about helping small business owners become profitable and stay profitable. For over 40 years she has coached, trained, and helped contractors and others achieve the business growth and goals they wanted to achieve.
Contact Ruth by emailing ruthking@hvacchannel.tv.
