Roughly 80% of AI usage in mid-market and PE-backed companies comes from finance and IT combined — and finance is where the value lands first. The work is high-frequency, document-heavy, and deadline-driven: exactly what AI does best.
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 baseline
Measured before we ship anything — and remarkably consistent across multi-entity teams.
The punchline
The playbook
The same five surfaces every time, because the hours live in the same five places.
Trained on 18–24 months of your historic codings, it proposes GL account, cost centre, and capitalization — each with a confidence score.
A deterministic pipeline drafts the journal; AI’s only job is flagging anomalies. Humans review the exceptions.
Statements normalize regardless of format — PDF, spreadsheet, scanned image. 90%+ of lines self-reconcile; your team reviews what doesn’t.
The pipeline rolls the pack forward and names the three to five things worth the reviewer’s attention — not forty tabs.
Inbound requests triage against your historical taxonomy; AP attachments extract on arrival. Most of the inbox never reaches a person.
The 90-day finance playbook
Every phase ends in something the CFO can inspect.
Hours by workstream, DSO, days-to-close, exception volumes — agreed in writing. Our fee is priced against it.
8–12 role interviews. Classifiers trained on 18–24 months of your historic codings — your chart of accounts, not a generic one.
Invoice coding, variance commentary, and reconciliation agents in production. Specialists review the queue, not the volume.
A full monthly close with agents working. Measured against baseline. Wave two committed.
Telemetry review with the CFO and sponsor. Company OS scoping if the numbers earn it.
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
Four engagements, four shapes
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.
Treasury & cash
Cash is where finance AI stops being a cost story and becomes a balance-sheet one.
Order to cash, end to end
days sales outstanding — 13 days of cash pulled forward
A 90-day rolling forecast in under five seconds, with scenario planning and full source transparency. Leadership called it the golden goose.
A PE-backed financial-automation software company
Biometric-secured approvals from anywhere. Missing mobile approvals were one client’s #1 reason for lost enterprise deals — fixed in four weeks.
A PE-backed treasury software company
The sleeper hit
Working capital released by collections agents at one industrial distributor.
Early-pay discounts captured once invoices posted fast enough to claim them.
The skill catalog
Named, callable workflows — a button, not an open prompt box.
Tone-matched to the sponsor’s cadence, with an open-questions appendix.
Currency effects separated from operating variance; anomalies flagged with root cause.
Unmatched pairs plus proposed rebalancing entries — the work that eats the close team’s last two days.
Every exception classified: approve, hold, chase, or write off.
The support schedules assembled before the auditors ask.
Usage, tickets, and notes distilled into a renewal risk score.
The data-request fire drill, answered from your own numbers.
The memo nobody wants to write, drafted for review.
Wave two
Committed at week twelve, when the telemetry earns it.
The quarterly certificate, assembled from the live numbers.
The monthly lender deck, in the format the credit team expects.
Remittances matched to open invoices, exceptions queued.
Claims history turned into a defensible reserve estimate.
The program balances nobody wants to untangle by hand.
Currency impact split from operating variance, per entity.
Usage, tickets, and notes distilled into a renewal risk score.
The memo nobody wants to write, drafted for review.
Before / After
Same deliverable, same analyst, same house style — the human enters later.
Before
~3 hours
After
~20 minutes
It scales down, too
A founder-led operator needs three things that work on day one.
Wired live to the point of sale and the books — prescriptive answers that name the driver and the action.
Captures emailed invoices, codes line items, flags price changes — “your fish vendor is up 11%” — posts on one-click approval.
One page, one location, one fix-this-week. The owner knows exactly where the margin went.
Three deliverables. Six to eight weeks. One fixed fee.
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
Proof
PE-backed software
AI-native cash-flow forecasting inside the ERP — a 90-day horizon in under five seconds, and every forecast shows its sources.
PE-backed software
Biometric mobile payment approvals — the #1 enterprise RFP blocker eliminated in four weeks.
Multi-site healthcare
One agent layer between every clinic and every system — a 60% faster close and $4.1M in annualized savings.
The point
The Foundation
Built into every band from day one — not bolted on after.
The Rest of the Spectrum
Ready to move
We’ll come back with a baseline of where your hours go, the first wave of skills, and the number we’d be accountable to.
Talk to LightCI