In the past, the function of a Finance office was primarily historical reporting. It was about documenting what has already happened, whether it was tallying receipts, reconciling ledgers, or explaining the variances in actuals versus budget during a post-mortem quarter close.
- 1. Vic.ai AI Finance AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 2. MindBridge AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 3. DataRails AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 4. Ramp AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 5. AppZen AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 6. HighRadius AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 7. Botkeeper AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 8. Blue Dot AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 9. Trovata AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- 10. Fathom AI Finance Smarter Money Management
- The “Black Box” Problem: A Note on Implementation
- The Changing Role of the Finance Professional
That function is starting to shift. The modern CFO Office is expected to function more like a business partner, providing insight to mitigate cash flow issues before they happen, and driving operational efficiencies with real-time insight. This transformation from “scorekeeper” to “strategic partner” is happening primarily due to Artificial Intelligence being integrated into core financial processes.
This is not sci-fi with robots making our financial decisions. It is software that is not very glamorous, but uses machine learning to automate tedious and repetitive financial tasks like accounts payable, expense auditing, or anomaly detection, so that finance professionals can spend their time on real work and do more analysis.
There are countless software solutions available with marketing jargon boasting that they are ‘AI software’. The hunt for tools that actually provide an ROI can be incredibly tedious. As a high-level overview, we have put together a shortlist of ten exceptional AI finance tools that have moved past just being a proof of concept and are actively addressing challenges for finance teams.
This list is part of our broader AI tools and productivity resources, where we review practical AI platforms across different use cases.
1. Vic.ai AI Finance AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Fully Automated Accounts Payable
Historically, accounts payable processes have required a lot of manual effort. Invoices can arrive in a variety of formats, including PDFs, scanned documents, and emails. Invoices have to be keyed in to the ERP. Vic.ai addresses this problem with a level of automation that sets it apart from typical OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools.
Unlike legacy solutions that are template based, that is, they require specific guidance on where a software should look on a page to find a ‘Total Amount’ or similar field, Vic.ai leverages computer vision and large datasets of past invoices to learn about an invoice without needing any instructions. The software can actually ‘see’ the invoice, predict the coding, and even help with the approval workflow.
Why it matters: Here, the objective is ‘touchless’ processing. The system is built to learn coding behaviors and vendor habits. The more it learns, the higher the confidence score. Invoices that fall within the confidence score range can be approved for processing and payment, which significantly lessens the cycle time for accounts payable.
2. MindBridge AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Risk assessment and audit
Traditional audits are based on some level of transaction sampling. The sample is analyzed for completeness, and if the sample is aforementioned, the auditor assumes the entire transaction is complete, in case it is a 5 or 10% sample. MindBridge uses AI to examine 100% of the transactions in a dataset and then reverses that process.
MindBridge analyzes missing time transactions, duplicate payments, and violations of Benford’s Law (a statistical oddity referring to the law of large numbers and the leading digits). MindBridge also does not score the entire general ledger for completeness; it does a score on every entry.
Why it matters: MindBridge helps internal audit teams and external accounting firms to mitigate audit risk. Internal controls are taken from a sample-based approach to a more complete transaction approach of auditing less than 100%.
3. DataRails AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: FP&A for Excel Loyalists
It’s widely believed that the most used finance tool is Microsoft Excel and likely always will be. Many FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis) tools attempt to shift finance teams away from spreadsheets and into a rigid cloud system. DataRails is the opposite and allows you to keep your spreadsheets.
DataRails integrates with Excel and connects multiple spreadsheets into a single database. It automates the consolidation of data, reporting, and analytics with advanced AI.
Why it matters: Keeping finance professionals in the Excel environment they are comfortable with is a huge advantage of DataRails. It reduces the friction of adoption to a new tool while still integrating the data integrity and automation features of a modern FP&A tool.
Some users may prefer general-purpose AI assistants that handle finance alongside writing, planning, and daily productivity.”
4. Ramp AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Spend Management and Cost Reduction
Ramp began as a corporate card provider, and has since expanded to a full finance automation tool. Its AI features are most advanced for “price intelligence” and receipt matching.
More advanced setups increasingly rely on autonomous AI agents to monitor data and trigger financial actions automatically.
The system links transactions to receipts via email or SMS integration, eliminating the need for dreaded expense reports. More interestingly, Ramp services utilize aggregated customer data for pricing benchmarks. For example, if your company pays $100 per seat for a SaaS product, and Ramp observes companies of your size paying $80, Ramp will notify you.\
Why it Matters: Most financial services assist in tallying costs. Ramp helps you spend less in the first place. The software performs as a procurement consultant, identifying overlapping subscriptions and negotiating for a combined power that an individual mid-market company would lack.\
5. AppZen AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Audit of Expenses and Compliance
While Ramp handles spend control, AppZen takes the role of the enforcer. AppZen is a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence that audits expense reports and supplier invoices.
Checking expenses is a Human’s job, and it is an inefficient one. Humans can only do so much before they tire and start to skim through things. AppZen is a Deep Learning system that reads receipts and audits every single expense before it is reimbursed. It uses automated policy checks, compliance scans (e.g. FCPA), and legitimacy cross-checking with external databases on merchants.
Why it Matters: It identifies micro leakages, such as the unapproved upgraded flight seat, the personal celebration masquerading as a “business dinner,” and the duplicate submission from three months ago. It allows the Finance team to enforce policy without having to manually play “bad cop.”
6. HighRadius AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best: Enterprise Treasury and Accounts Receivable
HighRadius works best for large companies. For them, the process of cash application (aligning received payments with outstanding invoices) is a source of enormous frustration. HighRadius has focused on the Office of the CFO, particularly the order-to-cash cycle.
The “Rivana” AI engine predicts when invoices will be paid. Rather than sticking to terms such as “Net 30,” the AI assesses the actual payment behavior of customers. If a customer consistently pays on the 35th day, it will adjust the cash flow forecast automatically. It also eliminates the hassle of cash application for complex payments.
Cash flow forecasting is vital to managing working capital for CFOs. Forecasting cash flow is usually a guessing game. However, cash flow forecasting using behavioral analytics to determine when cash will arrive in the bank allows CFOs to manage working capital more aggressively. This approach has the potential to “unreserve” millions in liquidity otherwise kept on hold for contingency purposes.
7. Botkeeper AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Accounting Firms Bookkeeping
Botkeeper is a hybrid solution that is designed for accounting firms that perform the bookkeeping for a number of their clients. It uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human support. The AI takes care of the classification of transactions, reconciliations, and collection of documents.
When the AI has a business transaction that is not recognized, such as one that is a purchase from a new vendor, the AI will flag the transaction. But, unlike some tools that send this back to the client, Botkeeper, which usually involves a human from their team, either resolves this or learns from the client to handle this automatically the next time.
Why it matters: There is a real shortage of accountants. Firms face challenges in recruiting a sufficient number of employees to perform the tedious bookkeeping tasks. Botkeeper essentially operates as a junior staff member with scalability, managing the data entry work so that the CPA can concentrate on advisory work and tax strategy.
8. Blue Dot AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Tax Compliance
Tax is tricky, and mistakes can have costly consequences. Blue Dot employs AI to review employee driven spending (expense reports, P-cards, benefits) to identify VAT (Value Added Tax) reclaim opportunities and ensure compliance with Fringe Benefit Tax.
It reviews and understands the context of each receipt. Was this expense a meal to entertain a client? a party with the staff? a travel expense? The tax implications differ across the jurisdiction. Blue Dot classifies the expense in different ways and maximizes the VAT recovery while ensuring compliance for the company.
Why it matters: Tackling the administrative requirements to reclaim VAT on small purchases has caused companies to not collect every penny owed to them. Blue Dot streamlines the identification of these claims and the administrative burden of VAT compliance transforms into a stream of revenue recovery.
9. Trovata AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Cash Management and Open Banking
Trovata stitches together the edges of open banking APIs and machine learning. In the past, obtaining a consolidated view from multiple banks required logging into different portals, downloading CSVs, and blending them together.
Trovata directly integrates with the banks via API and consolidates balances in real-time. He applies machine learning to identify cash flow patterns, and automates forecasting.
Why it matters: Speed. Identifying cash positions from yesterday is already outdated in today’s forecastable economy. Trovata offers a live pulse on liquidity, which is especially critical for treasury teams. This is needed with the additional complexity of multiple currencies and several bank accounts.
10. Fathom AI Finance Smarter Money Management
Best for: Management Reporting and Analysis
Data is worthless if one cannot tell the story behind it. Fathom connects with accounting software (such as Xero, QuickBooks, and MYOB) to provide visualizations of the data.
Fathom, like other integrated tools, has started to include smart features to automate the commentary and analysis of financial trends. Though it may not be in the ‘AI-first’ class like Vic.ai, Fathom has increasingly started to include smart features of this sort. It tracks KPIs, assesses profitability, and helps visualize scenarios (e.g., “What happens to our cash flow if sales drop 10% next month?”).
Why it matters: It bridges the communication gap. An account may understand a balance sheet, but a visual trend line, and a simple Go/No-Go KPI dashboard is a clearer message to a CEO or a Board of Directors. Fathom bridges the gap of finance strategy and business strategy.
The “Black Box” Problem: A Note on Implementation
The potential risks associated with the use of AI in the financial sector can be enormous, especially when evaluating the use of AI through the lens of the Black Box Problem. A healthy sort of skepticism is rooted in the financial profession; they need to show their work.
If an AI-based tool predicts a cash shortfall or marks a transaction as fraudulent, the finance team needs to understand the thought process. Those implementations are the most successful when people see AI not as a tool that gets things right with no question asked, but as an analyst, in this case, an AI analyst, with much more speed. The AI does the data processing and the pattern recognition, while the human professional gives his or her validation and makes the decision.
Proper data and data systems are also critical. An AI tool is as trained as the data it has access to. If your previous data is, for instance, unstructured, disorganized, or has errors, the AI will learn those errors, but at a higher speed. Before a subscription to any of the proposed tools is done, an internal audit focused on the data set is usually the best first step.
The Changing Role of the Finance Professional
Accountants fearing they may be replaced by artificial intelligence would take comfort in the fact that these fears are justified with the advent of applications such as Vic.ai and Botkeeper. With such applications calculating and reconciling account balances and categorizing transactions, the entry-level job requirements for accounting are disappearing.
Nevertheless, the accounting profession is still evolving, and so should the fears of the profession being replaced. Rather, consider the profession being elevated. With less time spent verifying invoice numbers, accounting professionals may now transform their focus to more meaningful and valuable tasks such as analyzing product line profitability, modeling future growth scenarios, and improving operational efficiencies.
The applications mentioned are not designed to replace the Finance function. Instead, they are designed to free the Finance function from the tedious and repetitive tasks of data entry and reconciliation so that the Finance function may focus on what it is ultimately designed to do—lead the organization to greater profitability and growth.
