The finance org we usually meet runs several ERPs that don’t talk to each other, a consolidation tool that trusts none of them, and a close held together by manual effort. You don’t fix that by pointing a model at it. You fix what the data means, then the workflows — and last, the agents.
Where we stand
The opinions underneath every finance engagement we run.
Copilots make analysts 10% faster at work that shouldn’t exist.
A fast close is a governance metric, not an efficiency one.
Put AI where the ERP ends — not on top of it.
Auditability is the moat. Accuracy is just table stakes.
Working capital is the highest-ROI AI project in finance — and nobody funds it.
The gap in the market
Finance AI keeps failing in translation — between the people who understand the close and the people who can ship software.
The consultancies
They know the close inside out — and deliver decks, pilots, and point solutions that don’t survive contact with production, the next audit, or the next acquisition.
The engineering firms
They build beautifully — and lose the room the first time a CFO describes a carve-out mid-TSA with three reconciliation platforms to consolidate. You can’t automate a workflow you can’t parse.
How LightCI is built
Big 4-trained finance and tax people who have sat in the seat, alongside engineers who ship production systems. The operator translates record-to-report pain into requirements; the engineer builds against them. Same room, every working session.
Two modes
The same method serves two very different moments in a portfolio company’s life.
The monthly rhythm of the finance org — the close, reporting, collections, payables. Agents live inside recurring workflows and compound month over month.
Post-close integration — new entities, redundant systems, deadlines measured in weeks. The work is manual and time-sensitive, so every week compressed pulls value creation forward. And the spend is a one-time cost, at exactly the moment the layer is cheapest to install.
Data readiness
Plugging an agent straight into a stack of ERPs works one time in ten. So we start where the complexity lives: what the data means. That knowledge sits in your team’s heads — we encode it into a semantic layer, so agents reason over curated, governed data. Raw exports never touch a model.
Working sessions with the controllers, analysts, and AP clerks who own each number. What a field actually represents, which system wins a conflict, why the exception exists — captured, not assumed.
Mappings, definitions, and business logic built up in layers AI can reason over — chart-of-accounts translation, entity structure, FX treatment — instead of raw table dumps and hope.
Every agent reads and writes through the same layer: consistent definitions, scoped permissions, a full audit trail. Add an agent, and it inherits the understanding.
The roll-up dividend
The operating model
Software agents run the workflow end-to-end — matching, reconciling, drafting, posting — with the controller staying in control. Some live in the daily and monthly rhythm of finance; others exist for the exceptional windows: audits, carve-outs, integrations.
Close orchestration · consolidation · flux narrative
Collections · DSO · dispute triage
Invoice capture · 3-way match · touchless AP
Variance · scenarios · the board pack
Cash forecasting · sweeps
Multi-entity filings
Spend & vendor intelligence
Exception monitoring
Architecture first, agents last
Worked example
The classifier proposes the full coding with a confidence score — above threshold, it posts untouched.
Meridian Surgical Supply
INV-20419 · Net 30
$148,250.00
Arthroscopy towers with endoscopic camera systems — qty 4, delivered to Clinics East.
Above the 0.85 auto-approve threshold. Posted to the ledger — logged, reversible, attributable.
By month four, 80–90% of invoices clear without a human touching them — every decision logged.
Closed-loop learning
What the audit finds
Measured with the finance team before anything gets built — and remarkably consistent across multi-entity orgs.
The punchline
The commercial shape
No seats, no open-ended retainers. Every statement of work names a metric — and payment is tied to hitting it.
Two tracks: where the data lives — ERPs, consolidation systems, the spreadsheets around them — and where the hours go, ranked with the finance team. The access we need is to people, not systems. Output: a ranked backlog — recurring, high-frequency workflows first, each with a quantified prize.
Each statement of work names the metric, the timeline, and the total cost — fixed price, with payment tied to hitting the metric. The first build stands up the semantic layer that everything after it inherits.
Guardrails and security prep with IT before any agent gets authority. A managed run keeps the agents maintained while we train the internal team — and hands over when they’re ready to own it.
Governance in finance
In finance, auditability is the price of admission.
Every decision, override, and version logged — a record, not a recollection.
Every output carries a score; every score carries a threshold.
Your ERP stays your ERP — agents post back through controls your team already trusts.
The CFO’s dashboard
The numbers the fee is accountable to — not adoption theater.
One rule
Case studies
Anonymized programs across four industries — the shape of the result holds.
The Close · Record-to-Report
~€450M revenue · 180 sites · 40+ legal entities · 30+ bolt-ons
Close orchestration across every entity — automated eliminations, tolerance flags, a drafted flux narrative each morning.
Order-to-Cash
~$1.2B revenue · 14 business units
A collections agent that scores risk, classifies disputes, and hands every collector a ranked worklist each morning.
Procure-to-Pay
~$600M revenue · 250+ locations · 6–8 acquisitions a year
Touchless AP end to end. New acquisitions plug into the pipeline instead of adding headcount.
FP&A & the Board
~$120M ARR · first institutional CFO
A reporting agent that writes the variance narrative in house style — and answers scenario questions live in the boardroom.
The Foundation
Built into every band from day one — not bolted on after.
The Rest of the Spectrum
Ready to move
Three weeks with your finance team. We come back with where the hours go, what the data looks like, and a ranked backlog — each item with a metric, a timeline, and a fixed price.
Talk to LightCI