ACL Findings2026
Finch: Benchmarking Finance & Accounting across Spreadsheet-Centric Enterprise Workflows
Haoyu Dong, Pengkun Zhang, Yan Gao, Xuanyu Dong, Yilin Cheng, Mingzhe Lu, Adina Yakefu, Shuxin Zheng
Abstract
We introduce FinWorkBench (a.k.a. FINCH) for evaluating AI agents on real-world, enterprise-grade finance and accounting workflows that interleave data entry, structuring, formatting, web search, cross-file retrieval, calculation, modeling, validation, translation, visualization, and reporting. FINCH is sourced from authentic enterprise workspaces from Enron (15,000 files and 500,000 emails) and other financial institutions, covering the period 2000-2025, preserving in-the-wild messiness of multimodal artifacts such as tables and charts, across diverse domains such as budgeting, trading, asset management, and operational management.
We propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted mining of workflows from authentic enterprise environments with expert annotation: (1) LLM-assisted, expert-verified derivation of workflows from real-world email threads and spreadsheet version histories, and (2) meticulous annotation requiring over 700 hours of expert effort. This yields 172 composite workflows with 384 tasks, involving 1,710 spreadsheets with 27 million cells, along with PDFs and other artifacts, capturing the intrinsically messy, long-horizon, knowledge-intensive, and collaborative nature of real-world enterprise work.
We conduct both human and automated evaluations of frontier AI systems, including GPT 5.1, Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4, and Qwen 3 Max. Under human evaluation, GPT 5.1 Pro spends an average of 16.8 minutes per workflow yet passes only 38.4% of workflows. Comprehensive case studies further surface the challenges that real-world enterprise workflows pose for AI agents.
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Builds on10
- GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable TasksTejal Patwardhan, Rachel Dias, Elizabeth Proehl, Grace Kim et al.ICLR 2026 · 154 citations
- TUTA: Tree-based Transformers for Generally Structured Table Pre-trainingZhiruo Wang, Haoyu Dong, Ran Jia, Jia Li et al.KDD 2021 · 88 citations
- SheetCopilot: Bringing Software Productivity to the Next Level through Large Language ModelsHongxin Li, Jingran Su, Yuntao Chen, Qing Li et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 75 citations
- WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-SeekingRyan Wong, Jiawei Wang, Junjie Zhao, Li Chen et al.ICLR 2026 · 66 citations
- FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial Search and ReasoningLiang Hu, Jianpeng Jiao, Jiashuo Liu, Dongyuan Mutu et al.ICLR 2026 · 29 citations
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