How Karndean Gains Confidence in Financial Data with the Board Controller Agent

If I was speaking to another finance leader, I think I would tell them this is a

great tool to do two things that are key

in finance. One, check your data has integrity, is

validated, has sensible outcomes before

submitting it to the wider group. But also you can use this as a

tool to give insight, commentary, and explanations that

can be used in reporting, presentations, sharing with wider teams.

I'd say the two best use cases we did was the

validation rules, having the ability to get it to check the data.

Do the retained earnings balance?

Do the expectation of the movement of balance sheet, does that get

seen in the P&L? Check as a local user before that data is submitted into group.

That's of real benefit because when it comes to group, we can have the confidence

in the data we're receiving that it's got integrity and the validity behind it.

We also then tested the intercompany function, look

at the intercompany matching at both the group and local level.

And that gave some interesting insights into what kind of variances there were.

If they were FX related, if it was just a genuine imbalance

we had to look at between all our territories. And we look at intercompany a lot as

a group, so it's beneficial to have that.

I think a lot of the benefit was it uses similar language to Board.

We've done a lot of work recently with Board, both putting in the FP&A module, the

GCR [FCR] module. So having that commonality of language was really

good because it just helped pick it up so much faster than had it been sort of

completely new language

to interact with it. I was able to just use the references I'm used to

now to tell it what to do, and that seemed to work fine.

It's a way to free up your time and to rely on the

insights that come from the AI tool and audits knowledge.