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📊 Monthly financial close
A 4-person finance team closes the books in 8 working days, losing 3 days to email chasing, 1 day to Excel bank reconciliation and a further day to hand-built PowerPoint reporting, with a fragile accruals spreadsheet and a weak audit trail. The to-be moves chasing, matching and drafting to agents inside Sage, keeps the finance manager as the single approval point for journals and the report narrative, and targets a day-4 close with an evidence log auditors can follow.
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The as-is: how it works today · 11 steps
The to-be: humans + AI agents · 14 steps, 8 AI-powered
Why this redesign
With only four people, the constraint is not accounting skill, it is waiting: three days of chasing and a day of matching consume half the close before any judgment is applied. The redesign moves the cycle earlier (pre-close chasing from day minus 3) and hands the waiting work to agents that live inside Sage and Outlook, the tools already in use, so no platform migration is required. Matching and reminders are given acts autonomy because errors are visible and reversible; accruals, journals and the management narrative stay hybrid because they carry audit and disclosure consequences. The fragile accruals workbook is replaced by an agent that recomputes from source data and writes down its own logic, removing the key person dependency the team fears. Journal posting rights are technically restricted to the finance manager, so approval remains a real control and not a rubber stamp. The evidence log is a by-product of the new flow rather than a report someone builds later, which is what turns the auditors' complaint into a solved problem.
Quick wins of this redesign
- Point a chase agent at open items in Sage and let it send consolidated pre-close reminders per cost-center owner from day minus 3.
- Turn on rules-based bank matching so humans only touch the exception queue instead of the full statement.
- Auto-generate the management pack from posted figures so the finance manager writes commentary instead of building slides.
- Log every agent proposal, approval and override automatically to give auditors a single traceable evidence trail.
Risks to manage
- An accruals agent that recomputes from source data may produce figures that differ from the historical spreadsheet, so the first cycles need parallel running and reconciliation of the difference.
- Over-eager auto-matching in bank reconciliation can clear items incorrectly and hide errors, which is why tolerances must start tight and cleared matches must be sampled.
- Outbound reminders sent by an agent can irritate cost-center owners if frequency or tone is wrong, damaging cooperation the close depends on.
- Concentrating drafting in agents risks the team losing familiarity with the underlying calculations, so review must remain substantive, not a click-through.
Suggested pilot plan
Start with the two steps that cost the most time and carry the least accounting judgment: the chase agent and bank reconciliation matching. Run them for three consecutive closes with one accountant as owner and the finance manager as approver, keeping the existing Excel process in parallel for the first cycle only. Success after three runs: chasing effort down from 3 days to under half a day, at least 80 percent of bank lines auto-matched with zero incorrect clearances found in a 100 percent sample of the first month and a 20 percent sample thereafter, and a complete evidence log for every cleared item. If met, extend to accruals and journal drafting in the following two closes, with the day-4 close and zero audit findings on traceability as the target for the next audit cycle.