Stanford Financial Management Services (FMS) continually assesses the financial ecosystem for opportunities to improve and simplify. This includes helping faculty and staff access the information they need to understand and take action on financial activities.
In 2025, FMS launched a new agent in Stanford’s AI Playground called the Financial Info Navigator (FIN), which aims to make financial information easier to find and apply appropriately.
What is FIN and what can it do?
FIN is a chat assistant designed to help Stanford faculty and staff explore financial questions and transactions. It is plugged into specific sources of information:
Fingate (fingate.stanford.edu) is the website managed by FMS, including financial activity overviews, guidelines, and steps involved in successfully completing financial activities.
Stanford's Administrative Guide (adminguide.stanford.edu), also referred to as the AGM, contains university-wide policies.
Specific Oracle Financials modules: FIN can retrieve real-time, read-only information from Expense Requests, PCard, Requisition and Purchase Orders Query, Supplier Query and Request, and Financial Approver Authority Query. FIN can also retrieve information from Expenditure Type Query (updated at the beginning of each month).
Please note that to include certain financial details in FIN responses, you must have an associated authority privilege.
| To view | You must have |
|---|---|
| Expense Requests System summary-level transaction data (e.g., transaction number, status, preparer name) | Access to the Expense Requests System through the SU Expense Requests authority privilege |
| Purchasing Card summary-level transaction data | Access to the Purchasing Card module through the SU PCard authority privilege |
| Expense Requests System or Purchasing Card details (e.g., business purpose, list of approvers, or line items and expense breakdown) | One of the corresponding authority privileges above plus one of the following:
This mirrors the existing Oracle Financials authority. |
| Requisition and purchase order data | Access to iProcurement systems through the SU iProcurement authority privilege. |
In instances where you don’t have access to the associated authority, FIN will reply: "Permissions prevent the display of that information for you. FIN restricts access to certain information based on your Oracle authority. Refer to the FIN News page for more information.”
Sample questions to ask FIN
With all of this information pulled into one agent, FIN can produce summarized information that can guide users through policy and procedure questions such as:
- Policy questions: “What are the vacation accrual rates?”
- How-to questions: “How do I request a purchase order?”
- Expense Requests: “Who's the preparer for transaction ER1234567?”
- Purchasing Card (PCard): “Who's the verifier for PCard transaction 1234567?”
- Purchase order (PO): “What's the status of PO 12345678?”
- Financial Approval: “Who can approve all transaction types for PTA 1234567-1-ABCDE?
- Supplier Query: “Is there an active supplier named ACME Inc.”?
- Expenditure Type: “What’s the expenditure type code for an Uber?
The goal of the tool is to surface answers quickly and effectively, avoiding errors and the need to seek support.
Get the most out of FIN
Unlike other agents, FIN is specifically designed to answer questions in a standardized manner consistent with its specified information sources; it is not designed to generate content or complete a task. To get the most out of FIN, use well-crafted prompts (refer to UIT’s GenAI Prompt Guide) that will help the tool help you.
For example:
- Use a clear instruction or question with as much information as possible, for example: “What are travel meal options when the source of funding is a sponsored award and the traveler is an employee?”
- Include the key term in your question, for example: “Which expenditure type should I use for office supplies?”
- Use the specific transaction number or transaction ID. For example: “What's the status of expense transaction ER1234567?” Or, include the specific details like transaction type, role, last/first name, and month + year date range six months or less. For example: “Show me expense transactions for payee [LAST NAME, FIRST NAME] from April 2025 – Sep 2025.”
Finally, remember that FIN is not perfect; responses may be incomplete or change. Always verify critical details in the linked resources that FIN provides, or contact the Financial Support Center for assistance.
Try FIN and provide feedback
To get started with FIN:
- Watch the short video introduction.
- Navigate to the Stanford AI Playground and log in with Single Sign On (SSO) using your SUnet ID.
- From the Models/Agents drop-down list, select Financial Info Navigator.
- Start a conversation by typing in the message field (bottom center) or use the microphone to speak your request.
- Prompts are powerful. Give clear, specific prompts with context, goals, and constraints to get better FIN responses. Check the GenAI Prompt Guide for more tips and examples.
Provide feedback
Users of FIN can submit feedback in two ways to help FMS enhance the effectiveness of FIN:
- Thumbs up and Thumbs down rating
- Detailed feedback to help FMS enhance the effectiveness of FIN. Share feedback about your experience by submitting a Financial Info Navigator feedback or assistance ticket.
Recent enhancements to FIN
Launched August 2026
- Integration with expense requests and purchasing card transactions: You can now look up expense requests and purchasing card transaction data. For example, “What’s the status of the expense transaction ER5473446?” or “Show me approved expense transactions from the preparer [LAST NAME, FIRST NAME] between April 2025 – Sep 2025.” This is intended to be a quick and easy way to find information on specific transactions rather than a comprehensive reporting or analysis tool.
Launched February 2026
- List of data sources and last refresh: FIN's home page now lists the specific data sources and their refresh cycles to remove the guesswork about what data FIN can access and whether you're seeing the latest information.
- Smarter expenditure type searches: You can now look up expenditure types by related search terms instead of exact matches. For example: “What's the expenditure type for an Uber?” The word “Uber” does not appear in the Expenditure Type Query description fields, but FIN understands you’re looking for codes on travel. You can also check if specific expenditure type codes are still active by asking, “Is expenditure type code ##### still active?” FIN will display the most relevant information by default, and you can always request additional details. The more context you provide, the better the results.
- Find financial approvers by award: You can now look up financial approvers by award, not just project-task. For example: “Who are the authorized approvers for Budget Control transactions on award [ABCDE]?” or “For award [ABCDE], who are the approvers for all transaction types?” This makes it easier to get the approval information you need whether that’s by project-task or award, just as in the Financial Approval Authority Query tool.