Published by AI Finance Office

Insights

What charity finance teams need to know about AI — the fortnightly briefing, longer articles, and practical resources you can use.

A fortnightly round-up of the AI news that actually matters to a charity finance team — tools, ERP releases, automation, regulation and the sector itself. Roughly a seven-minute read.

Issue 013 Latest

Write Access

Friday, 25 September 2026

The connectors start writing — a free tool that lets Claude and ChatGPT post journals into Xero, with no review step of its own
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 ERP MCP server is generally available, and the older version retires on 1 October
A Claude-to-NetSuite cash forecast ran on wrong numbers after its connection dropped, and nobody noticed until they went looking
Deloitte UK: 31% of workers who use generative AI for work do so without their employer knowing

Read issue → 8-min read

Issue 012

Approval Becomes the Feature

Friday, 11 September 2026

The approval gate arrives — Caseware’s Excel agent asks before it edits, and Paystand’s agents write to the ledger at an access level finance sets
Claude Cowork’s built-in browser switched on by default for Enterprise plans on 10 September, and Excel’s =COPILOT() function is withdrawn on 14 September
Microsoft has stopped publishing Dynamics 365 release plans altogether — there is no 2026 wave 2 plan and there will not be one
The UK liability position cuts both ways: exposure for using AI badly, and for not using it where a competent professional would

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 011

Switched On By Default

Friday, 28 August 2026

Xerocon US: Xero’s JAX moves from drafting to acting — cash flow actions, behaviour-based payment follow-ups, and automated chasing of missing paperwork
Xero data now reads into Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude — the ledger stops being somewhere you log in to
Business Central ships three agents inside the licence at no extra cost, and its MCP server exposes more than 650,000 actions
Protiviti: 77% of finance organisations employ AI, but only 14% under a defined strategy and 35% who can measure the return

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 010

The Controls Arrive

Friday, 14 August 2026

EU AI Act enforcement went live on 2 August — fines up to €15m or 3% of worldwide turnover, plus transparency duties that reach deployers, not just model providers
Anthropic shipped three governance features in seven days: real-time DLP inference hooks, self-hosted environments, and a Compliance API covering Claude Code and Cowork
Sage Intacct Release 3 landed on 7 August with AI anomaly detection in AP generally available — and the headline Finance Intelligence Agent still in early adopter
Gartner: the finance pyramid becomes a diamond, with around 70% of finance roles shared human-AI jobs by 2030

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 009

The Confidence Gap

Friday, 31 July 2026

97% of finance leaders say they could explain their AI agents to a regulator — 36% have nobody responsible for understanding how those agents work (Avalara, 1,500+ leaders)
Only 7% prioritise governance over speed, and Forrester finds 67% use AI in accounts payable but just 39% have an operating model for it
Gartner: 45% of finance AI investment leans to productivity, 20% to decision quality — and boards weight the second far more heavily
MCP ships its largest revision since launch, Claude Opus 5 arrives, and Sage Intacct Release 3 lands on 7 August

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 008

The Verification Tax

Friday, 17 July 2026

Finance teams lose ~13 hours a week and 26% of expected AI productivity gains to checking AI's work (Sage/IDC, 2,275 finance leaders)
The full Charity Digital Skills Report 2026: 79% of charities routinely use AI, but distrust has more than doubled to 35%
FCA publishes the Mills Review — its blueprint for agentic finance
Xerocon London, SAP's Financial Closing Assistant, NetSuite 2026.2 and the biggest MCP revision since launch

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 007

The Agents Arrive — and Governing Them Becomes the Job

Saturday, 4 July 2026

Live agents land across the stack: Xero JAX in Copilot, Intuit's QuickBooks agent team, SAP Joule, Trintech's close agents, Copilot Excel "skills"
The control layer arrives too: Anthropic's agent access & spend controls, BlackLine's Finance Control Console, Sage Intacct's read-only MCP gateway
Cisco's CFO: AI now drafts 80–90% of the company's regulatory filings
EU "Digital Omnibus" gets final approval — high-risk deadlines slip to late 2027; classification consultation extended to 23 July
Early Charity Digital Skills Report 2026: 91% of charities use AI, only 30% have a policy

Full briefing → 7-min read

Issue 006

The Model Leaps, Context Becomes the Constraint & the Governance Net Tightens

Saturday, 20 June 2026

Anthropic ships Fable 5 — then the US government orders it switched off three days later
Ramp names the real blocker: context, not the model (87% call AI critical, only 21% see value)
Digits' "Agentic Close" makes month-end an always-on process you configure in plain English
Gartner: finance AI succeeds only ~50% of the time — structure beats spend
Charity month-end, tested hands-on — plus 70% of UK SMEs now consult AI before their accountant

Full briefing → 7-min read

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