04 ยท Automation
Finance Automation & AI
Practical automation of recurring finance work: data refresh, reporting, reconciliation support and analysis. Applied after the process and data are sound, and always reviewable by people.
The problem
Skilled people spend their time on assembly.
- The same report is rebuilt every month. Exports, formatting and checks take days of analyst time.
- Reconciliations are entirely manual. Matching transactions line by line, with no exception handling.
- Handoffs slow everything down. Files move between people by email before anything can be reviewed.
- Documents are re-keyed. Invoices, contracts and statements are typed into systems by hand.
- AI tools are being tried ad hoc. Without controls, it is unclear which outputs can be relied on.
What we do
Automate the recurring work, keep people on the review.
- Scheduled data refreshes from accounting, billing and CRM into the reporting layer.
- Recurring reporting workflows: management packs and KPI reports produced on a schedule.
- Reconciliation support: automated matching, with exceptions routed for review.
- Variance-analysis workflows: variance tables and first-draft commentary prepared for a person to review and edit.
- Management-report generation and distribution from governed data, with consistent formatting.
- Document extraction from invoices, receipts and contracts, where volumes justify it.
- Workflow automation and process redesign to remove manual handoffs, designed before anything is automated.
- AI-assisted financial analysis for specific, reviewable tasks, with documented controls.
Sequence
Process and data first. Automation after.
Automation follows process clarity and reliable data. Automating an unreliable process produces unreliable results faster, so before automating a workflow we make sure the underlying process is defined and the data it depends on is clean and consistent.
AI is useful in finance for specific, reviewable tasks: drafting variance commentary from a reconciled table, extracting fields from documents, flagging unusual transactions for review. It does not replace the controls, judgement or accountability of a finance team, and we do not design it to.
What you get
Deliverables.
Automated reporting workflows
Scheduled refresh, reconciliation checks and report distribution, documented and monitored.
Exception queues
Items that need judgement routed to a person, with the context needed to decide.
Process maps
Before-and-after documentation of each workflow and its controls.
AI usage guidelines
Where AI assistance is used, what it is allowed to do, and how outputs are reviewed.
How it connects
Part of one system.
- Bookkeeping & Finance Operations
A stable, documented close is the precondition for automating any part of it.
- Finance & Data Infrastructure
Automation runs on the structured data layer. Without it, scheduled reporting has nothing reliable to read.
- FP&A, Financial Modeling & Valuation
Loading actuals, refreshing forecasts and assembling board packs are common automation targets.
Discuss a project.
Tell us what you are trying to fix or build: a close that takes too long, a forecast nobody trusts, a valuation question, reporting that is assembled by hand. We will reply with how we would approach it.