AI for Finance, Accounting and Payroll Teams
AI assistants and agents applied to reconciliation, management reporting and month-end in a small finance function.
- Instructional hours
- 10
- Schedule
- 5 sessions of 2 hours, one per week
- Price
- $3,000 per trainee
- Cohort size
- Up to 8
- Format
- Live over video; hybrid on request
- Delivery
- 100% live and instructor-led, during paid work hours
What
Learning objectives
- 01Reconcile exports from payroll, accounting and operational systems with AI assistance.
- 02Build and check a weekly or monthly management report.
- 03Draft variance explanations from report data.
- 04Catch exceptions before they post: duplicate IDs, zero or placeholder values, outdated distribution lists.
- 05Keep a report’s constants, recipients and rules in one documented place.
- 06Apply data-handling rules for financial and employee information.
Who
Who it is for
Bookkeepers, controllers, payroll and AP/AR administrators, office managers who keep the books, and finance leads at Massachusetts companies with 5–100 employees.
Comfort with Excel. No programming background needed.
For Express-funded seats, all participants must be W-2 employees of the company receiving grant funds, including owner-operators.
Why
Why it matters
Small finance teams are usually one or two people carrying month-end, payroll and reporting from memory, so a single absence stalls the company. Automating the mechanical steps and writing the rules down reduces errors, shortens close and payroll cycles, and removes that single point of failure.
How
How it is taught
5 sessions of 2 hours, one per week, live with an instructor: interactive lecture, guided demonstration and hands-on practice. All practice uses the course's standardized practice material: A sample payroll register, general ledger export and operational report set, identical for every participant.
Capstone
In session 5 each participant builds one reconciliation (payroll register to general ledger) and one governed monthly report from the practice files.
The instructor reviews each capstone live against a written rubric:
- The reconciliation ties out.
- Planted exceptions are flagged.
- The report’s rules and recipients are documented in one place.
- No restricted data is used.
Each participant receives written feedback against the rubric.
Session by session
Hour-by-hour outline
10 instructional hours. Every hour is live with the instructor, and every exercise uses the course's standardized practice material.
| Session | Time | Content | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hour 1 | How AI assistants and agents handle financial data, where they fail, and the data-handling rules for financial and employee information. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 1 | Hour 2 | First structured comparison of the practice payroll register and ledger export. | Hands-on practice |
| 2 | Hour 1 | Reconciling exports: matching keys, tolerances and exception lists. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 2 | Hour 2 | Reconciling the practice payroll register to the general ledger and producing an exception list. | Hands-on practice |
| 3 | Hour 1 | Building and checking a management report; drafting variance explanations from report data. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 3 | Hour 2 | Building the monthly report from the practice report set; drafting a variance narrative and tying figures to source. | Hands-on practice |
| 4 | Hour 1 | Catching exceptions before they post (duplicate IDs, zero or placeholder values, outdated distribution lists); keeping constants, recipients and rules in one documented place. | Lecture and demonstration |
| 4 | Hour 2 | Adding pre-posting checks and a single documented rules file to the practice report. | Hands-on practice |
| 5 | Hour 1 | Capstone build: one reconciliation and one governed monthly report from the practice files. | Hands-on, instructor circulating |
| 5 | Hour 2 | Capstone review: reconciliation ties out, planted exceptions flagged, rules and recipients documented in one place; written feedback. | Instructor review against the rubric |
Paying for it
Express reimbursement, once approved.
This course is not yet approved, so employers cannot apply for it yet. Once it is, an employer with 100 or fewer Massachusetts employees can apply to the Express program for 100% of the course cost, up to $3,000 per employee. The employer applies at least 21 days before the first session, with a Department of Revenue Certificate of Good Standing, a Department of Unemployment Assistance Certificate of Compliance and a W-9. Program questions go to express@commcorp.org. Our help with the application is free.
Support Forge LLC is a registered training provider with the Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund Express program. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Commonwealth Corporation or the Workforce Training Fund. Program terms are set by Commonwealth Corporation (commcorp.org/express) and govern over anything on this page.