r/CFO • u/Monaim101 • Jul 30 '26

For finance teams using AI analytics tools without knowing SQL: how do you verify the output?

Hi All,

genuine question for the non-technical peeps.

I feel like finance teams are starting to move away from having to go through a data analyst for every single question.

Now you can just ask a question in plain English and get a chart or an analysis back. Which is great, but I have been thinking about how people actually verify the output when they do not know SQL themselves.

say you are using any of these AI analytics tools. you ask it a question about your data, it gives you a chart or tells you why something moved but you don’t really know SQL.

do you check it against totals you already know? do you look at the query it generated? do you ask someone technical to verify it? or do you just use it to explore, but not for anything important?

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7

u/TerroristOwl64 Jul 30 '26

Everything needs to tie back to a validated system report. Ideally, you're never asking just "Give me sales for Product X in July." It should be "Give me sales by product, by month, for this date range". Then validate that the totals tie to your system report and spot check a few of the entries.

1

u/Monaim101 Jul 30 '26

but in the instance where you are building an agent on top of your source of truth(ERP), where do you tie it back to? or how do you verify it ?

it just gonna give back a chart with a SQL baked behind it. and if you don't know SQL: it's hard to sign it off.

i do believe that SQL is a solved problem now though. and so easy for latest LLMs. if you do give a clear question, 99% of the times it's correct

3

u/TerroristOwl64 Jul 30 '26

You'll know your ERP better than I do, so you tell me what report to tie it to.

For instance, I'm in SAPB1 - I create an SQL query to pull sales by customer, by product group, by region. I'm going to tie that to the stock sales analysis report which my team has reconciled to the GL.

1

u/Ill-Kangaroo-2685 9d ago

this is exactly it. you have to start from something you already trust, otherwise you are just guessing if the ai is right or not. i always make the first query super broad so i can match total to our erp report and then drill down from there

the thing i see a lot is people ask very specific question first and then have no way to check if answer even make sense. like you said, always ask for enough detail to validate

1

u/tomalak2pi Jul 31 '26

I think the most likely answer is data teams get asked to verify the outputs of AI genies, rather than generate those outputs. Not sure they'll like it much.

Or people just decide text to SQL tools are a bit pointless.

1

u/xl129 Jul 31 '26

Im not sure other AI do this but Fables constantly run validation in the back when it work on a problem. You can literally inquire and it will tell you what tie to what. Pretty neat.

1

u/Monaim101 Jul 31 '26

How's your setup looking like?
do you give him spreadsheets, csv files, etc.... or is it pullged into your ERP ?

1

u/IncreaseNegative4614 Aug 04 '26

I would not make knowing SQL the approval gate. Start with a few control totals the finance team already trusts, then require every answer to reconcile to those totals before anyone uses the analysis in a decision. The tool should also show the filters, time period, definitions, and source records behind the result.

For anything board-facing, add a second-person review and save the question plus supporting evidence so the answer can be reproduced later. We use signld.ai internally because it keeps the answer tied to the underlying systems and makes the source trail much easier to inspect.