Playbooks for Operations and Finance
Agent playbooks for reconciliations, reporting, vendor research, and process documentation, with the controls finance and ops work demands.
Operations and finance run on repetitive, rule-based work: matching bank lines to invoices, explaining why this month's costs differ from last month's, comparing vendor contracts, documenting how things get done. On paper, that's ideal agent territory. In practice, it's also where a quiet mistake turns into a misstated report, a missed contract deadline, or a payment to a fraudster.
The good news is that finance and ops already have the right habits for working with agents: controls. Someone prepares, someone else reviews. Totals must tie out. Every change leaves a trail. This lesson shows you how to apply those controls to agents, then walks through four playbooks: reconciliations, recurring reporting, vendor and contract review, and process documentation. You'll finish with one of them running on your own data.
Controls first: how finance habits apply to agents
You don't need new rules for agents. You need to apply the ones you already trust, with the agent treated as a fast, capable, new team member whose work always gets reviewed.
| Control | What it means | How it applies to agents |
|---|---|---|
| Maker-checker | The person who prepares work isn't the one who approves it | The agent prepares; a human checks and approves. The agent never approves its own work. |
| Tie-outs | Totals must match an independent source | Every agent output includes totals you can compare to the bank, ledger, or system of record |
| Audit trail | Every change is recorded and explainable | The agent shows its working: code, matching rules, and a log of what it changed |
| Least privilege | People get only the access they need | Agents work on exports and copies, read-only, never with the ability to pay or post |
| Materiality | Effort goes where errors would matter | Agents can flag every variance; humans investigate the ones above your threshold |
Two of these deserve emphasis. First, work on exports, not live systems. Download the bank statement, the ledger detail, and the vendor list as files, and give the agent those. An agent with a copy can't post a journal entry or change a payee. Second, no plugs. In accounting, a "plug" is a number forced in to make totals balance. Agents asked to "make it reconcile" will sometimes do exactly that. Your prompts must forbid it.