The close, prepared before the period ends.
Most of a finance team's month is not judgement. It is matching an invoice to an order, coding it to a cost centre, tying a bank line to a payment, and chasing the four things that stop a close. All of that is rule-shaped, checkable, and sitting on records the system already holds.
Matching and coding·Bank reconciliation·Close checklist
How this runs in most finance teams.
None of the below is a failure of the people doing it. It is what happens when the documents live in one system, the ledger in another, and the matching in a person's head.
- 01
Invoices arrive as attachments
A shared mailbox, a scanner, and a supplier portal, each producing a PDF that somebody opens, reads, and retypes into the ledger.
- 02
Matching is manual and partial
Order, receipt, and invoice compared by eye where there is time, and taken on trust where there is not — which is where duplicate payments come from.
- 03
Coding depends on who is in
The same supplier coded to two different accounts in two different months, because the rule lived with a person rather than in the system.
- 04
The bank is reconciled at month end
Downloaded, pasted into a spreadsheet, matched by amount, and the leftovers investigated in the last week — which is the worst possible time.
- 05
The close is a list nobody has
Unreconciled banks, unallocated payments, open advances, and unposted deferrals discovered during the close rather than before it.
What runs instead.
The agent reads the same records your team reads, with the same permissions, and does the parts that are rules. Everything that is a decision still reaches a person — with the work already done.
Capture and read
An arriving invoice is read into a draft purchase invoice with supplier, dates, lines, tax, and the supplier's own reference — from the document, not from a template.
Three-way match
Compared against the open order and the receipt, within the over-billing allowance you set, with the difference itemised where it does not match.
Coding by rule
Account, cost centre, project, and any dimension you have defined, applied from the item, the supplier, and the history rather than from memory.
Exceptions only
Matches post as drafts for release; mismatches route to a named person with both documents and the difference already set out.
Bank reconciliation
Statement lines matched to payments and invoices on reference, amount, party, and date, with the low-confidence ones held back rather than forced.
The close checklist
Unreconciled banks, unallocated payments, open advances, unposted deferrals, and stale exchange rates surfaced before the period ends.
What the agent may and may not do.
This is the part that decides whether any of the above can go live. It is written the way a job description is written, and it is enforced by the platform rather than by convention.
- May read
- Purchase invoices, orders, receipts, bank transactions, and the ledger — with your permissions applied
- May do
- Draft invoices, propose matches, apply coding, and propose reconciliations
- May not do
- Release a payment, approve an invoice, or post above its ceiling
- Ceilings
- Per agent, per period, and per document type, set by you
- Segregation
- It cannot approve what it raised — the rule that applies to your people
- Trail
- Every step written to the audit trail on the document it touched
- Reversible
- Returned to proposal-only mode at any time, immediately
The modules underneath this.
This runs on modules you would have bought anyway. There is no separate finance-automation product with its own data store to reconcile against.
How to tell whether it worked.
Measure these before you start. A programme that cannot show a before is not going to convince anybody of an after.
- Straight-through rate
- The share of invoices that match and code without a person touching them. This is the number the whole case rests on.
- Exception mix
- What the mismatches actually are — quantity, price, tax, or missing receipt — because that tells you what to fix upstream.
- Days to close
- From period end to signed-off statements, on the same definition each month.
- Unreconciled bank lines
- Outstanding at period end, which is usually the single biggest cause of a late close.
- Duplicate payments caught
- By the supplier-invoice-number check and by matching, before they leave rather than after.
- Aged unallocated cash
- Payments received and not yet applied to an invoice, which distorts every receivables figure.
The programmes this normally arrives inside.
Next step