How To Set Up Power BI Copilot And What It Really Costs
Power BI Copilot needs a paid Fabric capacity, not Pro. Here’s the full setup, what an F2 really costs, and what the tool does once it’s running.
Every F9 Finance Article
In these articles, you’ll find everything you need to crush it in the finance world. Whether you’re hunting for actionable finance advice, exploring the latest in finance technology, or looking to turbocharge your career growth, we’ve got you covered. Learn how to master financial modeling like a pro, streamline your processes with cutting-edge tools, and sharpen those leadership skills to stand out in any room.
Feeling stuck in your current role? We’ll show you how to leverage your strengths, build new ones, and impress the higher-ups with strategies that actually work. From taming unruly spreadsheets to automating tasks that eat up your time, these articles are packed with practical tips and insider insights. Oh, and did I mention we like to keep it entertaining? No dull lectures here—just real talk, served with a side of humor and a healthy dose of expertise.
Get ready to simplify your work, take charge of your career, and unlock opportunities you didn’t think were possible. Whether you want to polish your soft skills or discover innovative finance tools, everything here is designed to make your job—and your life—a whole lot easier.
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Excel and Power BI Techniques for Finance in the AI Era
There is a line in every finance team where Excel stops being the right tool and Power BI starts. Most teams find it by accident, usually on the third day of a close, when a workbook someone built two years ago finally refuses to open. AI moved that line. Not by much, and not where people expect. So this is what each one is now genuinely better at, where the handoff sits, and the four techniques worth learning in each. If you want the automation side on its own, Excel automation covers that, and variance analysis in Power BI covers the reporting side. This page is about choosing between them. Where the line really sits Excel holds 1,048,576 rows per sheet, which Microsoft publishes as…
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How to Use AI in Accounting, 7 Jobs It Does Well and 3 It Does Not
Accounting gets pitched AI as a way to close faster. That is the least interesting thing it does, and it is the thing most teams try first. The close is a process problem. Most of what slows it down is a person waiting on another person, and no model fixes that. The accounting function has a different set of jobs, and AI is genuinely good at some of them. So this is seven jobs where it earns its place in an accounting function, three where it does not, and the line between them. If you want the close specifically, automating the month-end close covers that, and account reconciliation covers the single biggest piece of it. Seven jobs it does well 1. Reading a contract and…
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Rolling AI Out to a Finance Team Without Breaking the Close
Most AI rollouts in finance teams are a license purchase and an email. Six weeks later two people use it daily, everyone else tried it once, and nobody can say whether the close got faster. The tools are the easy part. What decides whether this works is who owns what, what people are allowed to put into it, and what happens the first time it is wrong in front of the CFO. So this is the rollout, not the tool list. If you want the tools, AI tools for finance is the roundup. This page assumes you have picked one. Decide who owns it before you buy anything An AI rollout with no owner becomes IT’s problem, and IT will secure it correctly and never…
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AI Policy For Finance Teams (Template Included)
Your team is already using AI and nobody has written down where the line is. The four questions a finance AI policy has to answer, the audit trail clause that pays you back, and a fill-in-the-blank template.
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Excel MCP servers, and which one a finance team should pick
The Excel add-ins work on the workbook you have open. That is the whole model: one file, in front of you, while you sit there. An MCP server changes the shape of that. It gives the model a set of tools it can call against your files directly, so instead of you opening a workbook and asking questions, you point Claude at a folder and describe the job. For a finance team that difference shows up on the work that spans files: reconciling twelve monthly exports, rebuilding the same summary across four entities, checking that a model somebody else built agrees with the source data. Work where the bottleneck is the number of workbooks, not the number of questions. There is no official Microsoft Excel…
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AI use cases in finance, sorted by where they fit your month
Every list of AI use cases in finance is organized the same way, by tool. Here is what ChatGPT does, here is what Copilot does, here is a bullet about fraud detection that applies to a bank and not to you. That is backwards. You do not have a ChatGPT problem. You have a close that takes nine days and a forecast that gets rebuilt from scratch every month. So this is sorted by where the work falls in your month. Each one links to the place I have written it up, and each carries a verdict on whether it is worth your time yet, because a fair number of them are not. Checked 29 August 2026. The short version If you read nothing else,…
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Agentic AI in finance, and the 17% that matters
You have been shown the adoption chart by now. Some version of it: a bar that was small in 2023 and is large in 2026, under a headline about how finance is embracing AI agents. The number underneath is more interesting. According to CFO Connect’s State of AI in Finance 2026, published in March, 56% of finance leaders use AI, roughly double 2023. But 45% of teams are in limited pilot mode and only 17% have AI in core workflows. So five in six finance teams that report using AI are not running it on anything that matters yet. That gap is the whole story, and it is the one worth planning against. This is the strategic read. If you want the tool-by-tool version, AI…
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My AI finance stack, and what I dropped
The question I get more than any other is some version of: fine, but what do you actually use? Fair question, and most answers to it are useless because they list everything the writer has an affiliate link for. So this is the short version, organized by what each thing is for, with a link to the post where I put it through real work. There is also a section on what I stopped reaching for, which is usually the more useful half. Current as of 29 August 2026. This page gets updated rather than rewritten, so the date at the top is the one that matters. The whole stack on one screen The job What I use Where I put it through real work…
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AI Excel Formulas, and How to Check One
A model writes an Excel formula in two seconds. Checking it takes ten minutes, and the ten minutes is the job.
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