You can use AI tools to automate manual repetitive tasks in Google Sheets. For financial planning and analysis teams, this means automating tasks like data collection and cleaning, conditional formatting, formula generation, calculations, and routine report generation.
On a broader level, you can integrate AI tools that let you do more than data analysis. For example, you can sync Sheets with a project management tool to track project costs in real-time and automatically update financial forecasts created in Google Sheets.
You can even use these tools to get explanations on the formulas, pull data from the web and automate financial research, or build custom machine-learning models trained on your business data. The possibilities are endless.
The main benefit is a boost in productivity. With an AI tool automating time-consuming manual tasks, finance leaders can get more done faster and shift their focus to strategic planning and making data-driven decisions that improve business performance.
Other benefits you’ll gain from leveraging these tools include:
According to PWC, AI is reshaping processes across industries and teams, and it can greatly enhance how finance leaders create and deliver value. That is if you use the right tool.
There are many AI tools you can use in Google Sheets, depending on what you want to achieve. Common tools include:
When choosing an AI tool for Google Sheets, ensure you’re integrating one that has robust functionality and aligns with your finance team’s needs.
Here are some of the best AI tools to optimize your workflow in Google Sheets:
Best for: Cube’s simple and intuitive experience makes it an excellent choice for FP&A teams looking for a scalable, robust AI-powered financial planning tool at a reasonable price.
Cube is a cloud-based FP&A platform that helps companies hit their numbers without sacrificing their spreadsheets. It meets finance teams where they work—Google Sheets—and offers robust functionality that takes data analysis to the next level. It integrates bidirectionally with Google Sheets and provides a dashboard that enables you to see, explore, and dive into data in depth.
With Cube, you can seamlessly access, filter, and visualize your business data to make faster decisions while leveraging the ability to automatically generate and share reports like budgets and headcounts with important stakeholders.
Cube helps businesses eliminate manual, repetitive work and focus on high-level processes like strategic financial planning.
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Best for: Visualizing your team's processes, systems, and organizational structure, and planning projects.
Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming tool that lets users visualize complex ideas, create flowcharts and process maps, document systems and architecture, and create interactive learning courses.
Lucidchart offers finance teams a platform to build new financial service offerings while maintaining compliance. Its integration with Google Sheets enables finance teams to build flowcharts and visualize their processes using spreadsheet data.
Finance teams working remotely can leverage Lucidchart to collaborate from anywhere and remain aligned on goals.
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Best for: Brainstorming and validating scenarios during financial planning and forecasting.
ChatGPT is a productivity tool that lets users find answers to questions, brainstorm ideas, and learn new processes. It automates repetitive tasks, generates and debugs code, crawls the web for research, and analyzes data.
Finance teams using ChatGPT can train and customize the tool using data in Google Sheets. They can also create a custom GPT that gives responses tailored to their specific financial workflows. ChatGPT enables finance teams to automate data analysis and generate financial forecasts and reports.
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Best for: Automating data analysis and processes in a data cycle.
ZohoSheet is a collaborative spreadsheet tool that offers an AI-assisted data analyst, automated data processor, and integration with multiple work tools, including Google Sheets. It lets teams work on spreadsheet data in real time and automate data flow.
FP&A teams can use the tool to automate data processing in Google Sheets. They can remove inconsistencies and errors and pick out duplicates. They can also use an AI assistant to generate pivots and charts tailored to a dataset and add them to sheets using drag-and-drop functionality.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available on the website.
Best for: Automatically updating CRMs using Google Sheets data.
Coefficient syncs live data from business systems in Excel and Google Sheets. Users can connect to spreadsheets in one click, use robust data filters, and build live pivot tables on cloud systems.
Coefficient offers pre-built dashboard templates, visualizations, and reports for financial planning and analysis teams. Users can automate data collection and create financial models with live data.
Finance teams can also clean up records/data in bulk, automap fields and columns, and update other tools like Salesforce and HubSpot directly from spreadsheets.
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Best for: Syncing project and financial management in real time.
ClickUp offers a project management platform for managing any project using dashboards, timesheets and trackers, a project goals tracker, and a customizable view for teams to set tasks collaboratively.
Finance teams can integrate ClickUp with Google Sheets to combine their data analysis process with workflow automation. They can automatically update tasks in ClickUp based on actions taken in sheets and generate comprehensive project reports.
The platform also offers an AI assistant to enable users to do tasks faster. It integrates with other work tools like Notion and Miro.
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Best for: Generating Google Sheets formulas and debugging Google code.
Ajelix is a business intelligence software that offers AI tools for data analysis. For Google Sheets, it has a formula generator, formula explainer, app script generator, app script explainers, Google code debugger, and Google code optimizer.
More technical finance teams that automate their financial planning and analysis with app scripts and Google code can use Ajelix to optimize their processes. They can combine multiple related Google Sheet formulas, upload and aggregate data from other tools, and get breakdowns on formulas or code by asking a question.
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Best for: AI-powered customer experience analytics.
Medallia is an experience management software with AI-powered text analysis tool and natural language understanding that lets users analyze unstructured text data and track custom KPIs based on multiple criteria important to the business.
Financial planning and analysis teams can integrate Medallia into Google Sheets to import and analyze customer experience data. They can create dashboards, forecasts, and reports based on CX metrics.
Finance teams can also use the tool to monitor key metrics like customer satisfaction scores and financial impact directly in spreadsheets.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available on the website. Medallia requires users to contact sales for pricing.
Best for: Automating data analysis and visualization.
Excel Formula Bot is a data analysis platform that lets users convert text into spreadsheets, generate and receive explanations for Google Sheets formulas, and analyze complex data.
Finance teams can use Formula Bot to analyze data simply by asking questions. The tool enables them to translate text into tables, charts, dashboards, and insights.
It also supports data extraction and information retrieval, letting finance teams retrieve specific data in Google Sheets and get information on a specific subject.
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Best for: Creating a personalized ML model using business data.
Simple ML is a Google Sheets add-on that enables people to use machine learning inside Google Sheets without needing prior knowledge of coding or ML.
Finance teams can leverage Simple ML to automate high-level tasks like spotting abnormal values, predicting missing values, and forecasting future values through data trends and seasonality patterns.
They can also train, evaluate, or analyze AI models with their business data. However, finance teams must format their spreadsheet columns to match the platform’s specifications to use the platform effectively.
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Pricing: Free
Best for: Automating financial research and building personalized datasets.
PromptLoop offers AI models that crawl the web to extract information about company websites and enable users to build custom datasets based on specific research queries.
Finance teams can use PromptLoop to automate finance research during planning and forecasting. They can train the AI model using their financial data to personalize research results and import findings into Google Sheets.
PromptLoop also offers a labeling and categorization tool that enables the finance team to categorize data into revenues, expenses, and others automatically.
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When choosing an AI tool for Google Sheets, it's important to consider its functionality. Can the tool help you solve a recurring pain point and take your FP&A processes to the next level?
You need an AI tool that provides functionality beyond just automating manual tasks. It should enable you to:
Ready to work smarter and faster in Google Sheets? Book a free demo with Cube.