Practical AI for Accounting Teams
NECA Accounting Peer Group · Full-Day Workshop
Tuesday, October 27, 2026 · Centennial Hotel Spokane Facilitated by Adam Murphy, ImpactMe.AI
What you'll leave with
- A working understanding of how AI tools actually behave, so you can use them confidently and know when not to trust them
- Hands-on practice with real accounting tasks: cleanup, aging, WIP, reconciliation support, and client emails
- Your own working AI email assistant, built in the room, for the questions you answer over and over
- A clear view of how AI is changing finance work, and where your judgment matters more than ever
- A take-home kit: a prompt library built around accounting work, a safe-use reference card, a "thinking like AI" cheat sheet, and a 30-day practice plan
Our approach: prompts are the fish, thinking like AI is the fishing. You'll get both.
Bring: a laptop and charger, plus free accounts on at least two of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (and Copilot if your firm provides it). All exercise data is fictional and provided. Please don't bring real client data.
Agenda
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 9:00 | Welcome. Setup check, a live poll of the room, and what you want out of the day |
| 9:25 | How AI actually works. What these tools are (and aren't), why they're sometimes confidently wrong, and how to tell when they've looked something up. Short live experiments throughout |
| 10:10 | Break |
| 10:20 | The tool landscape. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and the new AI agents. What happens to your data on free vs. business plans. Hands-on: the same accounting question in three tools, side by side |
| 11:00 | Working with AI. Brief it like a coworker, iterate on a first draft, get a second opinion, and sort tasks into "AI is great," "AI with a human check," and "never alone." Hands-on: rebuild a weak prompt |
| 11:40 | Lunch at the hotel |
| 12:25 | AI + Excel lab. AI decides, Excel computes. Cleaning a messy job-cost export, planning a pivot to find slow-paying customers, and having AI explain a WIP schedule, including catching the formula it got wrong |
| 1:25 | Break |
| 1:35 | From doing the work to reviewing the work. Automating repeatable tasks and using AI to support your judgment: what the accounting software vendors promise, bank statements in and differences flagged, how much control to give AI over client email, and an audit of your own week. Hands-on: build an AI email assistant for the questions you answer every week |
| 2:30 | The workforce and what stays human. How AI will change your role, rolling AI out on a team, and measuring whether it's actually worth the time |
| 2:55 | Wrap-up and take-home kit |
If the day runs until 5:00: we'll continue with three more hands-on modules (making anomalies visible in your data, splitting and recoding a cost code safely, and building small custom tools), then an open lab for your own tasks and a Copilot clinic.
Safe use throughout: guardrails for client data and financial information are built into every session, at the moment they matter.
A living agenda: the timing above anchors the day. Depth on any topic will follow where the group's questions lead.
ImpactMe.AI · AI Made Useful & Human adam@impactme.ai · (509) 508-0804 · impactme.ai