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The reading guide. If your numbers face a board, an auditor or a regulator, this archive was written for you — here's the order I'd read it in.
Karim Lameer — Master Anaplanner, CIMA-qualified, 15 years in finance and FP&A. I build Grounded and published the Board Pack Test. LinkedIn
The argument
Why finance AI needs receipts
Three short essays that make the case. If you read nothing else, read these.
- Citations aren't verification
The difference between a footnote and a control, and the four controls to demand.
- The 4:45-on-a-Friday question
What the out-of-nowhere question actually costs, and why headcount never fixes it.
- Analysis is answering questions, but three-quarters of it is finding things
Variance analysis has four steps. Only one of them is analysis.
Foundations
The technology, in finance language
Plain-English explainers for the vendor calls: no hype, mapped to your own systems and your own week.
- “Why not just upload it to ChatGPT?” The honest answer
Including the cases where a chatbot genuinely is the right tool.
- What is an API, actually?
Explained through how your actuals already move between NetSuite, Anaplan and Workday.
- How an AI agent searches your files (and why Excel fights back)
The four search methods, and why spreadsheets break the most popular one.
- How to use AI at work without leaking data
A protocol your team can run in the ten seconds before pasting.
The proof
Walkthroughs, with receipts
Where the claims get tested in public: a benchmark with the answer key included, and the anatomy of the system it graded.
- The Board Pack Test
Four AIs, the same board pack, a deterministic grader. Repo public, disputes welcome.
- The anatomy of a financial knowledge base
Seven organs, and the three that engineering playbooks skip.
- The questions your finance team has stopped asking
The entire pitch for what I built, asterisk included, so you can pick it apart.
- The $2.1 million that was only in one of your reports
Two documents from the same close, quietly disagreeing. A two-minute walkthrough.
The Anaplan strand
AI around the model
Notes from eight years of Anaplan delivery — the automation, data pipelines and AI that wrap around a planning estate. First pieces landing soon; the posts page will carry them.
Everything else lives on theposts page. For the practical end of all this, there's a one-pager:10 automations your finance team could run tomorrow. And if you'd rather talk than read,book thirty minutes.