Prompting for finance work: a pattern that gets reliable output

Good prompts remove guesswork. Use five parts.

1. Role. “You are a senior financial controller reviewing a monthly close.”
2. Context. Paste the data, the period, the entity, the policy. Remove personal and confidential details you do not need.
3. Task. One clear job: “Explain the three largest variances against budget.”
4. Format. “Give a table, then a 100-word summary for the CFO.”
5. Checks. “List any assumptions you made and any figure you could not verify.”

Example

You are a financial controller. Below is the P&L for September versus budget (AED thousands). Identify the three largest unfavourable variances, suggest likely causes to investigate, and draft two sentences of commentary for each. Do not invent figures. Flag anything that needs data I have not provided.

Habits that help

• Ask for step-by-step reasoning on analytical tasks and read it.
• Ask the tool to critique its own answer.
• Recalculate any number it computes.
• Save prompts that work in a shared library.