Announcing Finance Copilot

While I love a good spreadsheet, it isn't the most efficient way to get answers to key financial questions. What our leaders and business partners really want is just an answer: How much budget do I have for headcount this quarter? How much did our vendor spend change year over year? And most importantly, why?

Businesses are moving fast, and teams need to make decisions for budget, headcount, vendor acquisition, and more based on accurate information from across the organization.

That's why we're launching Cobbler's Finance Copilot, built on top of OpenAI's GPT. Our goal is to help companies make sense of their financial data, so finance can easily provide the business the insights it needs in real-time.

Too often finance teams are bogged down by manual analyses, repetitive tasks, and challenges around disconnected data sources. Even in times of growth, finance estimates they spend 80% of their time on manual data entry and repetitive analysis.

Businesses today need to move fast and be flexible, especially in the face of market uncertainty—and the new workload is massive. Companies are asking finance teams to step up to drive the strategy of the organization while also demanding more day-to-day reporting to track progress and expecting continued support for their previous responsibilities. All of these demands come at a time when budgets are getting slashed—and among the first teams to lose them is finance.

Our Finance Copilot helps finance teams stay on top of the workload by aggregating data sources and providing a natural language interface to analyze financial outcomes. In doing so, Cobbler can automate headcount tracking, budget variance analysis reports/commentary, rolling forecasts, and anomaly tracking.

Working in FP&A can often feel like you're in a Simon Sinek book. The mantra, "It's not what you do, it's why you do it" quietly stands behind every single piece of financial analysis. It isn't enough to tell the CEO that you were over budget. What the business really needs to know is why—the business is over budget because we pulled forward 3 engineering and 2 sales hires by 3 months to support the launch of a new product. This was our guiding principle as we build out our AI-based FP&A Analyst. Instead of answering basic questions that you already have in a dashboard, we focused on answering questions deeply—and will continue to do so as we build out the functionality.

Let's be clear, you will always have more business context than an AI-based financial analyst, but Cobbler wants to equip you with as much analysis as possible so that you can focus on the truly strategic work.

The best part? Finance Copilot is available soon for all Cobbler customers. To try it out, reach out to your customer success manager or book a demo.