[HN Gopher] Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6
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Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6
Author : da_grift_shift
Score : 122 points
Date : 2026-02-05 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (claude.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (claude.com)
| bovermyer wrote:
| Based on the article... is this basically just making Claude
| better at formatting and data presentation, or does it also get
| better at analysis? I get the impression it's the former.
| warabe wrote:
| It's time to sell hedge fund stocks!! Jokes aside, I took the CFA
| exam last week and now I'm starting to worry about my career...
| sdf2erf wrote:
| I wouldnt worry. Unless you are just memorising stuff and dont
| actually understand anything - then you should.
| Ntrails wrote:
| You'll use a ton of AI but it won't wipe the humans out. In the
| end you'll have a compositional change, likely nothing
| catastrophic imo. In part because there is a buck to stop and
| Claude ain't got no hands...
| typpo wrote:
| 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/
| belter wrote:
| Dont use Excel for accounting....
| sdf2erf wrote:
| Lol stupid posts like this make me question this place.
|
| My brother who is a tax auditor at PWC uses spreadsheets all
| day long. Who are you again?
| Pooge wrote:
| Do they use it as a source of truth or do they import that
| data in a spreadsheet to let the user make their own
| calculations?
|
| Not the person you responded to but I'm genuinely curious.
| _se wrote:
| This entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting
| nonsense. Probably time to move on. "Don't use Excel for
| accounting" has to be the dumbest thing I've read in a
| year, even with all of the LLM bullshit going on.
|
| And that's including the people this morning who are
| apparently excited for LLMs to file their taxes.
| kami23 wrote:
| I've been having the same feelings lately, especially
| around the AI doomers coming in with some weird
| observations that make no sense. I usually don't comment,
| but seeing a lot of these types of overgeneralized
| responses.
|
| 'oh you do x? You don't do y? You're an idiot'
|
| That's not productive.
| belter wrote:
| I have the impression today you will be one of the
| 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/
|
| But you are correct, this entire site is full of idiots
| confidently spouting nonsense... :-)
|
| "Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in
| Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
|
| "Classification of Spreadsheet Errors" -
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224
|
| "A study conducted by Coopers & Lybrand found errors in
| 90% of the spreadsheets audited."
|
| "Impact of Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" -
| https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715
|
| "What We Don't Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today" -
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601
| _se wrote:
| You don't really deserve a response, but even the idea
| that you could tell someone to not use Excel for
| accounting and seriously project that you know anything
| about how accounting works in the real world is
| hilarious.
|
| You could think 500 random internet articles - it doesn't
| matter. The assertion is still ridiculous. You literally
| will not be able to get a job as an accountant without
| being able to use Excel. Don't be an idiot.
|
| You can also link to hundreds of articles showing that
| dynamic types cause errors. People don't care, they still
| use them when it makes sense to use them. There is no
| better mainstream alternative for accounting than Excel
| right now, period.
| belter wrote:
| Not a single reply on the technical and governance
| arguments?
|
| I think we agree...this site is indeed full of idiots
| confidently spouting nonsense. :-)
| shimman wrote:
| It's shocking and honestly pathetic. "Hey guys the
| software you use is not accurate" being met with such
| derision is how we regress as a society, not move
| forward.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| "This entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting
| nonsense."
|
| Too right - this goes for the arrogant geeks at the
| within the orgs of LLM producers who still havent
| displaced call center workers with their technology.
|
| Comical stuff. Really is.
|
| The lack of disconnect with what people actually do in
| jobs is absolutely breathtaking.
| torginus wrote:
| Afaik Excel is wicked fast at math (can handle ginormous
| spreadsheets, some real magic under the hood), while
| correctly doing decimal based math (1/5 is 0.2 exactly, not
| some floating point monstrosity)
| belter wrote:
| A yes PWC :-) That is what I would expect :-))
|
| I just hope the divine powers of Luca Pacioli might help
| you, before is too late. A whole set of accounting bodies
| and real world disasters expressly advise against its use
| and spreadsheets in general.
|
| You even have dedicated pages...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spreadsheet_mistakes
|
| EuSPRIG Horror Stories - Spreadsheet mistakes
|
| https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
|
| For example the (ICAEW) UK chartered accountants explicitly
| warn auditors. And research has shown that around 94% in
| these contexts contain errors:
|
| "Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" - https://faculty.tuck
| .dartmouth.edu/images/uploads/faculty/se...
|
| Also... Excel does not use exact decimal arithmetic. It
| stores numbers in IEEE-754 binary floating point, which
| cannot precisely represent many decimal values used in
| accounting. Microsoft documents this explicitly:
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...
|
| It also only preserves 15 significant digits and silently
| zeroes anything beyond that:
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-
| specificati...
|
| So this means:
|
| - decimal values are approximated
|
| - rounding errors accumulate
|
| - large financial values lose precision
|
| - results depend on formula structure and rounding order
|
| That alone disqualifies it as Accounting ledger.
| Historically you have lots of famous examples of bad
| outcomes of treating Excel as financial infrastructure...
|
| The JPMorgan London Whale - $6B loss A flawed Excel risk
| model and copy paste errors understated risk and helped
| produce multi-billion losses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /2012_JPMorgan_Chase_trading_lo...
|
| TransAlta energy trading -- $24M loss Simple spreadsheet
| row misalignment in bidding model cost aprox 10% of the
| company profit. https://www.lumeer.io/spreadsheet-for-
| project-management/
|
| Fannie Mae - $1.3B reporting error wrong spreadsheet
| formula caused more than $1B accounting misstatement. https
| ://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/28/microsoft...
| https://archive.is/w1cjj
|
| Fidelity Magellan -- $2.6B error Missing minus sign in a
| spreadsheet overstated capital gains by billions.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spreadsheet_mistakes
|
| Large audit firms also publish entire risk frameworks, (
| and I am sure PWC does also...) explaining why uncontrolled
| spreadsheets are a major source of financial misstatement
| in the first place.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| An Excel spreadsheet is a bad source of truth for data. It's
| fine for analytics though.
| bdangubic wrote:
| this might just be the worst advice I've ever read here -
| well done mate, well done
| belter wrote:
| HN ignorance on display...
|
| The Journal of Accountancy - "Bugged by Excel's calculation
| errors" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/ma
| r/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...
| someuser54541 wrote:
| I feel like I'd be really skeptical of results from a non-
| deterministic model for something as precise as accounting....
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah, seriously, I use AI all day every day but that
| terrifies me.
| purplerabbit wrote:
| I know plenty of nondeterministic accountants
| aaaalone wrote:
| With tool use you do reduce the risks.
|
| It's not like these models calculate.
| eggsby wrote:
| Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:
| behnamoh wrote:
| Anthropic does anything to keep the Claude hype going; from
| fearmongering ("AI bad, need government regulations") to wishful
| thinking ("90% of code will be written by AI by the end of 2025"
| --Dario) to using Claude in applications it has no business being
| in (Cowork, accessing all your files, what could go wrong?) to
| releasing "research" papers every now and then to show how their
| AI "almost got out" and they stopped it (again, to show their
| models are "just that good") to prescribing what the society
| should do to adapt to the new reality to doing worthless surveys
| on "how AI is reshaping economy, but mostly our AI not others".
| henning wrote:
| Their chart only goes up to 70.
| layer8 wrote:
| At least it starts at zero.
| Havoc wrote:
| And then you hand it to your boss who takes a 20 second look at
| it and asks why you made a projection that assume massive revenue
| growth and 3 years of perfectly flat utilities, insurance, G&A -
| no inflation etc.
|
| It does look really promising as a skeleton starting point
| though. Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand.
|
| Not unlike the boilerplate start we saw in AI coding a couple
| years back
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(page generated 2026-02-05 23:01 UTC)