TLDR: The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) is championing generative AI (GenAI) as a pivotal tool for finance professionals to enhance efficiency and accuracy in financial close procedures. A new course within ICAEW’s GenAI Accelerator Programme, launched in late September 2025, provides practical guidance on integrating GenAI into period-end close activities, aiming to free up professionals for more strategic interpretation and decision-making.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) has underscored the significant potential of generative AI (GenAI) to revolutionize financial close procedures, enabling finance professionals to move beyond routine tasks towards more analytical and value-added activities. This initiative is supported by a new course, part of ICAEW’s GenAI Accelerator Programme, which was introduced at the end of September 2025.
Peter Beard, ACA, Director of GenFinance.AI and a key partner in developing the programme, emphasized the transformative impact of GenAI. ‘GenAI is transforming our work by converting many manual tasks into more efficient, semi-automated workflows, enabling much faster preparation and review,’ Beard stated. He further noted that ‘Period-end close has long been associated with late nights, repetitive reconciliations and a heavy reliance on spreadsheets. GenAI promises to ease the burden at four key stages of the process as we outline in our GenAI Accelerator Programme.’
The new course specifically addresses financial operations with a dedicated module on financial accounting and period-end close, offering step-by-step guidance and real-world examples. It focuses on integrating GenAI at four critical points in the period-end close process:
1. Initiation: GenAI can identify and classify economic events from unstructured data, such as emails and PDFs, by scanning and summarizing documents to suggest classifications.
2. Recording: By describing transactions in plain language to a GenAI system, practitioners can receive draft journal entries that comply with accounting standards.
3. Processing: GenAI tools can assist in verifying accuracy through reconciliations and adjustments. For instance, they can calculate accruals based on anonymized service contracts, extracting relevant terms and providing calculated figures with clear explanations.
4. Reporting: GenAI can check balances for errors, provide summaries by department or cost center, and even draft narrative commentaries for financial results, significantly reducing manual compilation time.
This shift is timely, as a Gartner survey highlighted that 55% of finance executives aim for a ‘touchless financial close’ by 2025, with 86% seeking faster, real-time closes within the same timeframe. The adoption of GenAI in finance is on the rise, with nearly 78% of financial institutions implementing it for at least one use case in 2024, often focusing on risk and compliance.
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ICAEW’s broader GenAI Accelerator Programme, launched in September 2025, aims to equip members with the necessary skills to leverage this technology. Peter Beard highlighted that GenAI offers ‘unparalleled and democratised access to knowledge and capability,’ making it ‘one of the most fundamental technological changes of our time.’ While professional oversight will always be crucial, GenAI is set to fundamentally change the nature of accounting work, allowing professionals to focus on higher-value tasks.
