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Comment by typpo | Hacker News Reader

Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes.

My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree.

Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/

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I feel like I'd be really skeptical of results from a non-deterministic model for something as precise as accounting....

Yeah, seriously, I use AI all day every day but that terrifies me.

I know plenty of nondeterministic accountants

With tool use you do reduce the risks.

It's not like these models calculate.

The deterministic part (calculations) is done by Excel.

The non-deterministic part is turning human instructions ("calculate the NPV over 10 years for X given Y") into Excel.

This is already a non-deterministic process (humans are non-deterministic!). The question is if an AI model can be more reliable than humans, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.

The correct path is pretty clear, so the logits for following that path are going to be a long way from off-path.

For something like this the real problem is training the model to use Excel (which will show up by it being confused which sheet it is on or trying to use the wrong window or things like that), not the non-determinism.

"The non-deterministic part is turning human instructions ("calculate the NPV over 10 years for X given Y") into Excel."

erm theres an NPV function built in excel.

But humans non-deterministically use that or use a hand-rolled formula.

Humans dont enter numbers non-determinstically. WTF are you on about lmao.

Have you ever done anything related to corp finance/valuation in a professional setting? Highly doubt it.

> erm theres an NPV function built in excel.

Exactly!

The LLM just needs to make sure it uses it appropriately. Doing that bit is the non-deterministic part, but the NPV calculation itself is completely deterministic.

Youre not quite getting it, are you.

When you setup a spreadsheet, you choose a column or cell to show the NPV. You use the npv formula on this cell and apply it to inputs from other columns or cells.

This process of deciding what data to put in what column and how to apply NPV to it is non-deterministic. You could choose to put it in column A, or column B or maybe even row 3 - it depends!

The LLM does that part non-deterministically.

Do you really think you come off as a good person posting things like this? This place is to satisfy intellectual curiosity, not to lord your supposed intelligence over others, without even proving it exists in the first place.

so basically what you're saying is that: it doesn't do the math, it tells the math-doing-thing what math to do. Basically, instead of humans using Excel, imagine AI using Excel?

Yet I don't understand the aha moment here? It might save analyst time but aren't there already enough automation that you don't really need to tell the AI to tell the math-doing-thing to do the math because the math-doing-thing is already optimized for most general functions? What are we gaining from adding the non-deterministic process here when the real non-deterministic process is still the human being prompting what to do?

Seems like a solution to a non-problem from my pov.

Setting up spreadsheets is just programming in an unconventional environment.

And it has all the requirement translation requirements of programming

Sure in the sense that you're setting up a program that has inputs and outputs etc. But then all math is programming. All language is too, even speaking can be considered programming if you're stretching the definition enough. But I will disagree that setting up spreadsheets = basically software engineering.

Dont use Excel for accounting....

An Excel spreadsheet is a bad source of truth for data. It's fine for analytics though.

HN ignorance on display...

The Journal of Accountancy - "Bugged by Excel’s calculation errors" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-c...

ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants) — "Rounding Errors Revisited" (Excel Tips #447) - https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/e...

Just a reminder that an accountant who might say "I use Currency format" is still working in binary floating point as the format is just used as a display mask. And using VBA macros with the Currency type will hit problems at the boundary, when values move between the worksheet and the macro. The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...

"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

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