Kipper
Conversational finance, AI-powered data access.
Articles about Kipper, conversational finance, and getting trustworthy answers from NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Xero.
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Conversational finance: the idea and the constraints
Conversational finance means asking your finance system a question in plain English and getting the actual figure back, in whatever tool you already work in. The appeal is obvious. The reason it has taken so long to become trustworthy is that the obvious way to build it — retrieve some text about the numbers and let a language model compose an answer — produces confident, well formatted, and occasionally wrong figures.
The architecture that works is different. Translate the question into a database query, run it against real records, and return what came back. The language model handles the translation; it never produces the number. That distinction is what separates a tool you can quote in a customer conversation from one you have to double-check, and it is the subject of several posts here.
The other recurring theme is who this is for. The value is not in giving three finance professionals a faster way to do what they already do well. It is in giving the several hundred people around them — sales, service, warehouse, operations, executives away from a desk — a way to answer their own questions without interrupting anyone, and without a finance-system login nobody wants to provision.
FAQ
Kipper questions
Scope, access, and data coverage for the topics in this category.
Asking a finance system a question in plain English and getting a precise answer back, from a tool you already use such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, SMS, or an AI assistant. In a well built system the number comes from a query against your records, not from a language model's estimate.
It translates your question into a SQL query, runs it against a synced copy of your finance records, and returns the result. There is no document retrieval or RAG step, so there is no point at which a model is asked to produce a figure. When the data cannot answer a question, Kipper says so.
People who need a factual lookup and do not have a finance-system login: sales and account reps, service and support staff, warehouse and operations teams, project and cost-center owners, and executives who want one number without opening the ERP. Finance professionals benefit indirectly, by fielding far fewer interruptions.