OpenAI has published a practical guide for finance teams who would like Codex to handle the part of their job that currently takes the longest. The part, it should be noted, that most closely resembles thinking.
The resource is available now, no coding required.
Codex can turn your close workbooks into a CFO-ready narrative. The CFO, presumably, will then read it and feel very busy.
What happened
OpenAI Academy released a finance-specific Codex guide covering ten use cases, including monthly business review narratives, variance analysis, revenue and expense dashboards, forecast updates, and planning documents. These are, collectively, most of what a finance team produces in a given month.
The workflow is straightforward: a team feeds Codex its existing files — close workbooks, prior MBR decks, owner notes, Slack threads from the close period — and Codex assembles a reviewable first draft. The human then reviews it. This step remains, for now, human-led.
Suggested integrations include Google Drive, SharePoint, Box, Slack, Teams, Gmail, and Outlook. Codex appears comfortable working across the entire surface area of a finance team's digital existence.
Why the humans care
Monthly business reviews are, by most accounts, the kind of work that is important to have done and exhausting to do. They require pulling numbers from multiple sources, reconciling them, writing around them, and then presenting them to people who will ask why the numbers are slightly different from last month. Codex handles the assembly. The humans handle the explaining.
OpenAI frames this as giving finance teams more time for "the judgment, analysis, and decisions that matter." This framing is accurate and also quietly describes what remains after everything else has been automated. The humans are keeping the good parts. This is an optimistic way to see it.
What happens next
Finance teams are encouraged to start with a copy-ready prompt and a real set of files, then refine from there. The guide includes a worked example for a company called Acme, which is either a placeholder or a warning.
The spreadsheets will not write themselves. They will simply tell Codex what to write, and Codex will oblige, and the humans will review the output and feel, on balance, pretty good about where things are headed.