By Greenkey Accounting Services
Treat an AI financial summary as a draft until its figures agree with the underlying reports and its explanations are supported. Confirm the entity, period and accounting basis, review the Balance Sheet, and then trace significant changes through the Profit & Loss and General Ledger. A fluent explanation can still describe the wrong cause.
NIST's Generative AI Profile identifies the risk of confidently presented inaccurate content, often called hallucination. In accounting, a useful response is to separate three questions: Is the calculation right? Is the underlying record complete? Does the evidence support the explanation? Passing one check does not pass the others.
Confirm what the summary is actually summarizing
Check the company or property, report dates, comparison period, accounting basis, currency and whether figures are consolidated. Identify whether the reports are final or still changing during close. Comparing a partial month with a completed month, or a cash-basis report with an accrual-basis report, can produce a convincing but unhelpful narrative.
Use only a company-approved tool with appropriate permissions and data handling for the records involved. Borrower, tenant, owner and banking details deserve particular care. A written summary rarely needs every identifying field in a source report; limit the input to what the approved workflow requires.
Start with the Balance Sheet
Confirm reconciled cash and review the support for receivables, payables, loans and other significant balances. Check whether restricted or owner funds are being presented as money available to the operating business. A positive bank balance does not establish what can be spent after obligations and funds held for others are considered.
At Greenkey Accounting Services, the review starts with the Balance Sheet and supporting balances, then moves to a trailing Profit & Loss and the General Ledger. Loan information and transaction support help establish whether the records provide a dependable foundation for the commentary.
Recalculate the change before accepting the story
For a fictional example, suppose a comparable expense increases from $20,000 to $25,000. The dollar increase is $5,000 and the percentage increase is 25%, calculated using the prior amount as the denominator. Those figures alone do not establish that vendor prices rose by 25%.
The increase could reflect more activity, a late bill, a different property mix, a one-time purchase or miscoding. Trace the change into the General Ledger and source documents. If the prior amount is zero or negative, a routine percentage comparison may be meaningless or misleading; explain the dollar movement and context instead.
Separate evidence from an explanation to investigate
A summary may report that commission revenue fell because fewer transactions closed. Confirm both the recorded revenue and the operating data before accepting that cause. In a mortgage brokerage, timing of earned revenue and receipts may differ. In a Real Estate business, delayed closings or changes in retained commission can affect the result. The ledger may not contain enough information to identify the cause by itself.
For property management, confirm whether the summary concerns a property's operating performance or the management company's own profit. Higher rent collections do not automatically mean higher company earnings. Ask for the source behind each material explanation and label unresolved causes as questions rather than conclusions.
Check what the tool did not review
Intuit's current Accounting AI support article describes potential issue detection in Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss accounts as supplemental review and notes that coverage does not include every account. Apply the same question to any tool: which reports, accounts or transactions were included, and which were left out? An empty exception list is not proof that the entire close is complete.
Turn verified findings into a decision
Keep the reviewed report version, the accepted explanation and any outstanding questions together. Assign a person and due date to unresolved items. Once the cause is established, decide whether the response is a coding correction, a collection follow-up, a budget change or a forecast update. A polished paragraph has value when it helps someone take an appropriate next step.
Questions business owners ask
Can an AI summary replace a month-end close?
No summary by itself completes reconciliations, cutoff work or balance support. Confirm those tasks through the accounting process before treating the summary as an explanation of final results.
What should I do when the AI explanation has no supporting source?
Keep it as an unverified possibility and ask for the report, transaction detail or operating evidence needed to test it. Do not present the proposed cause as an established fact.
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Greenkey Accounting Services helps mortgage, Real Estate and property management businesses in Orlando, Central Florida and nationwide connect dependable books with financial reporting, performance analysis and dashboards. The goal is a clear explanation of what changed and what deserves attention next.
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Sources and review date
Sources reviewed October 10, 2026. Technology features and employment projections can change; recheck dated information before publication.
- NIST Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile AI 600 1 — Published July 2024; reviewed October 10, 2026
- Intuit Learn about Accounting AI features — Updated October 9, 2026; reviewed October 10, 2026