I can now produce draft statutory accounts in ~1 hour instead of 1 week.

I can now produce draft statutory accounts in ~1 hour instead of 1 week. 👏

Finance teams and external accountants are still preparing statutory accounts the same way they did 10 years ago:

Export trial balance
Copy into Word
Rebuild formatting
Update notes manually
Fix errors
Repeat
It’s slow, painful, and expensive.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been testing how far you can push ChatGPT on this.
Short answer: a lot further than people think.

Here’s the simple workflow I now use:

Step 1: Upload last year’s accounts (PDF)#

ChatGPT reads:
- Structure
- Notes
- Formatting
- Accounting style

A crucial tip is to enable Canvas in the Chat or the Agent you are using. Without this the results will be incredibly poor and no better than playing with Word. Getting ChatGPT to use Canvas, enables it to re-build the look and feel of the previous year accounts incredibly closely.

Step 2: Upload current year trial balance (Excel)
It maps:
- Accounts → categories
- Balance sheet & P&L structure
- Movements vs prior year

Step 3: Use a structured prompt / agent
Example:
“Using last year’s statutory accounts as a template, rebuild a full set of draft accounts based on this trial balance. Keep structure, update all numbers, and flag any inconsistencies.”

Step 4: Output
You get:
- Draft P&L
- Balance sheet
- Notes structure
- Clean starting point

Step 5: Iterate and Create Agent

After the initial output there are probably many improvements that can be resolved by further prompts and iterating on further changes. Also there will be some gaps of information that you will need to give to ensure the accounts are complete (such as required non-financial data). However, rather than fixing these manually yourself it is possible to iterate in the same chat to get closer to a final report and set of accounts.
Once you have got close to what you expect, then have ChatGPT (or similar AI model) to create a new agent, that remembers this process and steps for future work.

The impact
What used to take:
3–5 days of work
Now takes:
~1 hour to get to a solid first draft
And more importantly:
Finance teams spend time reviewing, not rebuilding

Reality check
This doesn’t replace accountants, but it does replace a lot of low-value manual work.

Where this is going
The firms that adopt this:
Increase margins
Deliver faster
Win more clients
The ones that don’t: Stay stuck in manual processes

I’m currently applying this across UK and Dutch companies and building it into a repeatable workflow.
If you want to see how this works (or try it on your own accounts), feel free to reach out.

If you want other Finance AI How To Guides from me pop over to learn and contribute to the Finance AI community in Netherlands and Europe. There I can share my AI Agent Master Prompt to save you even more time in creating your annual stat accounts for filing.