Punchcard in Excel: Verify agent work like a formula

TL;DR

• Punchcard is an AI agent in Excel that’s as auditable as a formula.
• Every cell shows its reasoning, with one-click citations to cell and document references.
• Built with feedback from 30+ audit and accounting firms. Firms are finishing work in well under half the time.
• More is coming soon: new agentive solutions for audit and accounting that work across your entire engagement binder.

Why do you trust an Excel formula but not AI?

With a formula, you check the cell references and understand the logic. It’s auditable. But formulas only work with data in cells. How do you trust an agent in Excel when it’s driven by a prompt and gives you a value, not a formula? What if that value comes from a contract or statement it reconciled against your workbook?

The answer? Punchcard, an agent as auditable as an Excel formula. Every cell Punchcard generates includes its reasoning. That means the answer, then the logic it used, with inline citations to your workbook and the documents in its context, like contracts, invoices and other spreadsheets. One click opens any citation, so you can make your own judgment: validate it, flag it for review, or talk to the agent to change its logic.

For accountants and finance professionals, Excel is home. But so much of the work that must be accounted for and audited lives in documents. Punchcard lets you do that work alongside AI while keeping your professional judgment.

Why it works this way

With feedback and experience from 30+ audit and accounting firms, we learned that you can’t just template this work and let an agent run it in the background, like you can with standardized tax workflows. Every client hands you different evidence and follows a different process. So Punchcard works with you: inside Excel, in the workbook templates you already use. It asks when something is ambiguous and follows the patterns you set when you edit the workbook yourself. We call it CoAudit.

What we’re seeing

Our clients are completing tasks in well under half the time it took them last year, using the same workbook templates they already have. They give the agent its instructions, written in the Excel file, in a skill file, or as a completed example from another year, and add this year’s documents for context. Then they review its work and give it feedback, exactly as they would audit staff. And it handles the ridiculously large general ledgers and PDFs that normally slow your computer to a crawl.

Three months ago, we launched the Excel add-in to our existing customers. Usage is already 3x what our web-based agent saw. It’s flexible, but simple to learn.

If you do work in Excel with context from documents, we’d love to have you pilot Punchcard for free. Book a demo to meet our team of recovering auditors.

P.S. I quit auditing at EY because I wanted to exercise professional judgment, not do what felt like busy work. Helping auditors get there sooner and form better audit opinions is what drives our team.