CPA Practice Advisor argues most finance teams still run on Excel stitched together manually — and AI on fragmented data produces confident errors, not better decisions.
Via CPA Practice Advisor: Why AI Won't Fix Your Broken Finance Processes
Billions of dollars are flowing into AI under the banner of finance transformation. CFOs and FP&A leaders are sold predictive models, automated variance analysis, and conversational agents that will "seamlessly" drive strategic decisions.
Luka Mijatović, writing in CPA Practice Advisor, argues the industry is skipping an uncomfortable truth: artificial intelligence does not fix a fragmented finance infrastructure. It exposes and amplifies the cracks. When month-end reporting becomes a negotiation over whose spreadsheet is correct, adding AI does not produce wisdom. It produces faster, more confident mistakes.
For owner-led accounting firms, bookkeepers, and finance-heavy practices, that is not an abstract enterprise debate. It is the difference between selling another tool subscription and knowing whether AI will return billable hours or multiply rework.
Despite decades of ERP implementations, Mijatović notes that many finance organizations remain fundamentally stitched together from spreadsheets — different versions of the truth, manual reconciliations, email chains carrying adjustments nobody fully trusts.
At enterprise scale he cites a blunt reality: manual spreadsheet work carries a 100% chance of error; the only unknown is how much it costs. Owner-led firms feel the same pain in smaller numbers — duplicated client workpapers, partner hours lost hunting variances, and staff rebuilding models that should have been single-source years ago.
AI hype asks firms to leapfrog that foundation. Buy the chatbot. Deploy the agent. Skip the grueling data-layer cleanup. The computer-science adage still applies: garbage in, garbage out — now with a confident tone and a dashboard.
Before a finance function becomes intelligent, Mijatović argues it must become reliable. You cannot put the cherry on the cake until someone bakes the cake.
Smart owner-led firms treat AI as the last layer, not the first:
When data, modeling, planning, and reporting live in one connected environment, AI can finally answer useful questions — why revenue dropped in a region, not which file version is "right."
"When you layer advanced artificial intelligence onto fragmented, inconsistent, and disconnected data, you do not magically get better decisions. You simply get faster, more confident mistakes." — Luka Mijatović, CPA Practice Advisor
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AI is not a band-aid for bad architecture. It is an amplifier. Owner-led accounting and finance practices that want AI to pay for itself should bake the cake first — reliable data, clear ownership, reconciled workflows — then add the cherry.
That is less glamorous than launching a chatbot. It is also the only path from reporting on the past to shaping the future without embarrassing variances.
Start with a Workflow ROI Audit. Find out where AI saves real time — and where it would only make mistakes arrive sooner.
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