AI Is Finally Coming for the Month‑End Close
Finance teams have lived in Excel purgatory for decades. While sales got CRMs and developers got GitHub Copilot, controllers have still been copying numbers between spreadsheets at 2 a.m. every quarter. That imbalance is starting to shift. The latest sign: InScope, a young startup trying to automate the most soul‑crushing parts of financial reporting, has just raised fresh capital. In this piece, we’ll look at what InScope is actually doing, why investors are suddenly excited about the back office, and what this wave of AI means for auditors, CFOs – and for the software incumbents who thought they had this market locked up.
The news in brief
According to TechCrunch, InScope has raised a $14.5 million Series A round led by Norwest, with participation from Storm Ventures and existing investors Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company was founded in 2023 by ex‑accounting leaders Mary Antony and Kelsey Gootnick, who previously worked together at logistics unicorn Flexport and later held finance roles at Miro, Hopin and Thrive Global.
InScope offers an AI‑powered platform designed to streamline the preparation of financial statements such as 10‑Ks and 10‑Qs. The product doesn’t yet generate complete income statements or balance sheets on its own, but it automates much of the tedious work: verifying calculations, enforcing consistent formatting, and standardising elements like dollar signs and commas. InScope claims this can save accountants up to 20% of their time on reporting tasks.
Over the last 12 months, the startup’s customer base has reportedly grown fivefold, and it has signed notable clients including CohnReznick, a top‑15 U.S. accounting firm by size.
Why this matters
Financial reporting is one of the few remaining core business functions still dominated by manual work and desktop files. That’s not because it’s low value – quite the opposite. It’s because the risk of getting it wrong is enormous: restatements, regulatory fines, reputational damage, even criminal liability. As a result, many CFOs have been reluctant to let automation touch anything beyond basic data extraction.
InScope is interesting precisely because it isn’t trying to leap straight to “AI files your 10‑K.” Instead, it goes after the invisible 20–30% of the process that everyone hates but nobody has bothered to industrialise: formatting footnotes, checking cross‑references, hunting down rounding issues and copy‑pasting numbers between Word and Excel. That’s where automation has the best cost/benefit ratio and the lowest perceived risk.
The immediate winners are mid‑size accounting firms and in‑house finance teams that are permanently under‑resourced. A 20% time saving, stacked across multiple reporting cycles per year, translates into either fewer late nights or the ability to absorb more clients without proportional headcount growth. For partners at firms like CohnReznick, that is very tangible margin expansion.
The potential losers are the incumbent disclosure‑management vendors and offshore service providers that still rely heavily on manual labour. Platforms like Workiva and Donnelley Financial Solutions helped move filings from pure desktop chaos to the cloud, but their workflows still assume a lot of human grunt work. If AI‑native tools manage to cut that grunt work in half, the value proposition of legacy platforms will be questioned – or they’ll be forced into an acquisition or rebuild.
Crucially, InScope’s founders come from the buyer side of the table. This type of “founder‑market fit” matters far more in regulated domains than in consumer apps. Accountants are famously risk‑averse; they will only trust tools built by people who truly understand materiality thresholds, audit trails and the terror of a last‑minute SEC comment letter.
The bigger picture
InScope’s funding fits a larger pattern: AI is moving from flashy demos to painfully specific workflows. The first wave of “AI for finance” focused on chatbots over BI dashboards or generic document summarisation. Useful, but not transformative. The next wave goes deeper into vertical processes: closing the books, revenue recognition, tax provisioning, and now external reporting.
We see similar moves in other domains. Legal tech startups are building AI systems for contract review with clause‑level controls rather than generic GPT wrappers. In software engineering, tools like GitHub Copilot don’t try to replace developers; they insert themselves into the most repetitive parts of the job. InScope is applying that same pattern to financial reporting.
Historically, financial reporting has already undergone one big digital shift: from paper and desktop files to XBRL‑tagged electronic submissions and collaborative cloud tools. That phase created winners like Workiva. The next phase is about semantic understanding, not just digitisation. Can software understand that a change in revenue recognition policy affects not only one note but multiple tables, KPIs and risk disclosures – and propagate that consistently?
Big vendors in ERP and consolidation – think Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, the major cloud accounting platforms – are all embedding AI into their products, but they tend to focus on data entry and anomaly detection inside the ledger. The last mile of narrative reporting has remained stubbornly artisanal. That is exactly the gap that specialised players like InScope are targeting.
If they succeed, expect a broader shift in how audits and filings are conducted. Audit teams could move from hunting for typos and broken links to focusing almost entirely on judgement calls and complex estimates. That won’t eliminate auditors or controllers, but it will change the skills mix: more systems thinking, less spreadsheet gymnastics.
The European angle
Although InScope’s early traction is with U.S. firms and U.S. GAAP filings, the pain it addresses is arguably even worse in Europe. Listed companies here juggle IFRS, local GAAP, ESEF (European Single Electronic Format) tagging, and – increasingly – non‑financial disclosure under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The reporting stack is getting denser every year.
EU regulation both accelerates and constrains this kind of AI. On one hand, the EU AI Act and existing frameworks like GDPR push providers toward transparency, auditability and strict data‑handling practices – exactly what finance teams want. On the other, these rules will punish any vendor that treats financial data as training fodder or can’t explain model outputs in a way auditors accept.
For European corporates, especially in DACH and the Nordics where reporting culture is particularly rigorous, AI‑assisted tools could become essential just to keep up with the expanding compliance scope. The combination of IFRS disclosures, sustainability KPIs and taxonomy alignment is too complex to manage with email threads and desktop spreadsheets.
There is also an opening for regional players. European firms will care about data residency, multi‑GAAP support and integration with local staples like DATEV in Germany or established consolidation tools used across the continent. U.S. startups like InScope can absolutely win in Europe, but only if they take these specifics seriously instead of assuming a one‑size‑fits‑all SEC workflow.
Looking ahead
In the next 12–24 months, expect InScope and its peers to double down on “copilot for controllers” rather than full autopilot. Human‑in‑the‑loop review will remain mandatory – not just for comfort, but to satisfy auditors, regulators and internal control frameworks like SOX.
The real test will come when AI‑driven changes move from formatting to content. It’s one thing to auto‑fix inconsistent comma styles; it’s another to suggest edits to management’s discussion and analysis (MD&A) or to re‑categorise items on the cash flow statement. When that happens, organisations will need clear policies: What can the AI change on its own? What requires explicit human sign‑off? How are those decisions logged for future inspections?
M&A is also likely. Legacy vendors with deep distribution but aging tech stacks have every incentive to buy AI‑native players crossing meaningful revenue thresholds. Conversely, some AI startups will struggle with the slow, sales‑heavy nature of selling into finance and audit, and may fade before reaching scale.
For readers working in finance or audit, the practical takeaway is simple: this wave is real, but it will be uneven. Tools that demonstrably shrink close cycles or reduce review iterations will stick. Shiny dashboards with vague “AI insights” will not. Now is the time to pilot narrowly scoped solutions, build internal AI usage policies, and upskill teams on how to oversee – not fear – automated collaborators.
The bottom line
AI is finally attacking the most painful layers of financial reporting, and InScope’s Series A is a clear signal that investors believe there’s a real market here. The winners will be teams that treat AI as industrial machinery for the back office, not as a magic black box. The question for every CFO and audit partner is no longer whether these tools will arrive, but how quickly you are willing to redesign your reporting processes around them – before your competitors do.
