Services / Automation
We automate the reading, matching and routing behind invoices, claims and reconciliations, while approvals, tolerances and segregation of duties stay enforced in the system. Routine work moves on its own. Exceptions reach a person with the reason attached.
Controls first. Evidence per transaction. No automated release of money.
The business case
Teams automate the happy path and leave the approvals, tolerances and audit trail as they were, so every edge case comes back to a person and the savings never appear. We start from the control requirements your auditors test, then automate inside them.
High document volume, a controller or AP clerk acting as the integration between systems, a close that stretches past week two, or receivables that depend on someone remembering to chase.
If volumes are low, the process is not yet defined, or the real problem is a ledger you are about to replace, fix that first. We will tell you when automation is the wrong next step.
Where this applies
These are example situations, not pre-packaged promises or claims about past results.
Take invoices from email and portals, extract the fields, match them against purchase orders and goods receipts, and route only the mismatches to a person.
Learn: how many invoices touch a keyboard before they are paid?
Generate and send documents, match incoming payments to invoices, and build a collection queue ordered by risk rather than by who last replied.
Learn: how old are the invoices nobody has chased?
Read receipts, check them against policy and card data, and send only the claims that break a rule or carry an unclear purpose to a reviewer.
Learn: how many hours a month go to checking compliant claims?
Match balances across bank, ledger, billing and inventory feeds as transactions arrive, so the close starts with exceptions instead of a pile of unknowns.
Learn: how many days of close are spent finding the difference?
Screen new suppliers, standardise vendor and customer records, and keep payment and tax details current so downstream automation has clean data to work with.
Learn: how many duplicate vendors are in your master file right now?
Produce management packs from the same ledger data every month, with variances explained against the driver rather than described after the fact.
Learn: how long after month-end does the first report arrive?
How the work flows
Extraction and matching handle what is predictable. Anything outside tolerance stops at a checkpoint where a person decides, and that decision becomes part of the evidence trail.
Baseline measures before build, the control and approval matrix, one evidence trail per transaction, and a runbook your team can operate without us.
Silent auto-payment, bank details changed inside the automation, savings figures without a baseline, and a replacement ERP project disguised as an integration.
Groundwork
A finance process is not just a sequence of steps. It is a set of approvals, tolerances and segregation rules that exist for a reason. Those are captured first, so automation moves inside the controls rather than around them.
ERP, accounting, banking, billing, expense, procurement and payroll tools, with what each system owns, what it exports and where the manual re-keying happens.
Approval limits, delegations, tolerances, segregation of duties and the audit requirements your auditors actually test. These become the rules the build must obey.
The formats that really arrive: PDFs, scans, photographs, EDI files, portal downloads and spreadsheets, with volumes, languages and quality.
Volumes, cycle times, error and rework rates, late-payment counts and days to close, measured now so improvement after delivery is comparable rather than argued about.
Intake & extraction
Field values are stored with the position in the document they came from, so a reviewer can see why the system believed what it believed.
Email, portal and upload intake that records the source file, sender, timestamp and any forwarding history, so the original document is always retrievable.
Vendor, reference, dates, currency, gross, tax and line items pulled from structured and unstructured documents, each carrying a confidence score.
Document type, entity, cost centre and project inferred from content and history, then routed to the right workflow, ledger coding and reviewer.
Vendor and customer records validated before processing: duplicates, changed bank details, expired tax registrations and missing approvals for new suppliers.
Matching & validation
Deterministic checks run first because they are cheap, fast and explainable. Language models are used where inputs genuinely vary, and always with a checkable outcome.
Two-way and three-way matching against purchase orders, goods receipts and contracts, with tax, currency, rounding and duplicate-invoice checks.
Agreed thresholds decide what posts automatically. Anything outside tolerance, or without a match, becomes a work item with the reason and the missing piece named.
Free-text purpose of purchase, non-standard line descriptions, credit notes and partial deliveries read and summarised so a reviewer starts with context, not a blank screen.
One queue per role, ordered by value at risk and ageing, with the history of the vendor and the previous decision visible next to the item.
Approval, payment & evidence
Automation prepares, checks and proposes. Release stays behind an explicit human approval with a recorded rationale.
Routing by amount, entity, cost centre and delegation, with escalation on timeout and a hard stop when a required approval is missing.
Payment runs assembled from approved invoices with bank details taken from verified master records, and changes to bank details flagged and re-verified out of band.
Create, approve and release held by different identities, enforced in the system rather than by convention, with break-glass access logged and reviewed.
Every processed item keeps its document, extracted fields, match results, approvals and timings in one retrievable trail your auditors can test independently.
Reconciliation, close & reporting
Reconciliation moves left, from a month-end scramble into a daily routine, and the close becomes a review of known exceptions rather than a search for unknown ones.
Bank, card, gateway, ledger, billing and inventory feeds matched as transactions arrive, with unmatched and partially matched items surfaced the same day.
A close checklist with named owners, dependencies and due points, so the controller sees what is blocking the ledger rather than chasing people for status.
The same figures assembled the same way each month, with driver-level variance commentary generated from the underlying records and reviewed before issue.
Forecast receivables and payables from actual payment behaviour, with the assumptions behind the curve stated so they can be challenged.
Tools & platforms
These are the platforms we typically assess, not a list you must adopt. Where data cannot leave your environment, we name the self-hosted option.
Formats normalised and originals stored, so every later result can be traced to a source document.
Chosen per document family on accuracy, volume cost and whether the data may leave your environment.
Approval chains, SLAs, retries and human queues matched to the complexity and hosting your team already runs.
Integration feasibility checked against real APIs, permissions, posting rules and rate limits before anything is promised.
Payment files produced in the format your bank accepts, with changes to bank details verified out of band.
Control requirements from your auditors turned into enforced system behaviour with retained evidence.
Ledger, document and workflow data joined into one reported view, with the same definitions used by every pack.
Delivery approach
We build a single document or reconciliation flow end to end and run it in parallel with your current process before anything is switched over. Findings are shared as they emerge, so there are no surprises at cutover.
Agree the processes in scope, the systems we may review, the control requirements that must hold, and the baseline figures to measure against.
Output: Scope note, control requirements and baseline measures
Walk real transactions end to end with your team, review the documents that actually arrive and confirm the approvals and tolerances in force today.
Output: Current-state process map, document inventory and exception list
Decide step by step what is deterministic, what needs language-model judgement and what stays with people, then design the queues, controls and evidence.
Output: Design note with rules, tolerances, approval matrix and data contracts
Build integrations, extraction, matching and approvals, then run alongside your current process on real volume with every discrepancy reviewed.
Output: Working automation, parallel-run results and reconciliation evidence
Move to production behind staged release, test the controls with your auditors' questions, and hand over the runbook and ownership.
Output: Production release, control test record, runbook and trained owners
A finance owner who can set tolerances and approval limits, access to test data or masked extracts, and a contact who can answer the auditors' questions about the new design.
Scope, access and the rules that must never be automated are agreed in writing before build. Every rule in the design shows its source, so you can change it and see what moves.
What you receive
Everything is delivered so your team owns it, and so an auditor can test it without us in the room.
Invoices, claims and receipts captured, read, classified, matched and routed, with exceptions delivered to the right person with the reason attached.
Approval limits, tolerances, segregation of duties and break-glass handling enforced in the system, documented and tested.
Daily matching with an exception queue, a close checklist with owners, and the reports that come out of the same data.
Per-transaction documents, extracted fields, match results, approvals and timings, retrievable for audit without rebuilding the story.
How each flow works, how to add a document type or vendor, how to handle a failed run and who to call when one does.
We are not a bookkeeping or audit provider. The automation is built to your control requirements; your auditors and advisors remain the ones who accept them.
Related services
These are the services finance work usually connects to.
Questions before starting
No. We agree baseline measures before we build and report the figures we actually move: cycle time, touchless rate, exception volume and days to close. Whether that turns into savings depends on how your team uses the capacity.
No. Extraction, matching and recommendation are automated; release of money sits behind an explicit human approval with a recorded rationale, and payment bank details are only read from verified master records.
Low-confidence or unmatched items never post. They go to a queue with the source document, the extracted value, its confidence and the reason it failed, so a person decides quickly instead of re-entering everything.
Yes. Self-hosted extraction and language models, your own cloud accounts and on-premise connectors are all options where data cannot leave your boundary. We are explicit about which parts of a design require a hosted service.
No. We keep the ledger and systems of record you have, and automate the work around them. If a system genuinely blocks the automation we say so, and we do not start a replacement project as a side effect.
One document flow with a defined process and reachable systems often runs in production within weeks. Group-wide rollouts with several entities, legacy formats and auditor review take longer, and we sequence them so value arrives in stages.
That is the design intent. Every processed transaction retains its document, extracted fields, match results, approvals and timings, and the control configuration is documented so it can be tested independently of us.
Then we say so. Below a few thousand documents a month, configuration in tools you already own, or fixing the process itself, is usually the better answer than a custom pipeline.
Start with one flow
Share the documents, the systems and the controls in force. We will propose a scope, the tolerances to agree and a first flow to put into production.