Agents that run the back office, under control
Finance, procurement, HR, and IT operations live in swivel-chair work: copying data between the ERP, the ticketing queue, the spreadsheet, and the inbox. Agents do that work end to end — with segregation of duties, approval gates, and an audit trail your controllers can defend.
- Cross-system, multi-step processes
- SOX & SoD controls built in
- Human approval on financial actions
- Full lineage for every transaction
The work isn't hard. The hand-offs are.
Back-office operations are governed work, not just busy work.
An invoice doesn't just need to be paid — it has to match a PO and a receipt, be coded to the right cost center, clear an approval threshold, and survive a quarter-end SOX walkthrough. A new hire doesn't just need a laptop — they need provisioned access that respects least-privilege, a role that doesn't violate segregation of duties, and an entitlement record an access reviewer can sign off on.
So the bottleneck is rarely the decision. It's the orchestration: pulling data from the ERP, checking it against a policy, updating the ticket, emailing the requester, and leaving evidence that all of it happened correctly. That's exactly the shape of work agents are built for — and exactly the work where uncontrolled automation gets a finance team in trouble.
Where agents earn their keep
Each runs across your real systems and leaves a defensible trail — autonomous where it's safe, gated where it counts.
Invoice & three-way match
Ingest invoices, match against PO and receipt, code to the GL, flag exceptions, and stage payment runs for approval — touching AP only through controlled actions.
Employee lifecycle ops
Drive onboarding, role changes, and offboarding across HRIS, IdP, and ticketing — provisioning least-privilege access without breaking segregation of duties.
Procurement & vendor intake
Triage requisitions, run vendor due-diligence checks, deduplicate the vendor master, and route spend over threshold to the right approver.
Reconciliation & close
Reconcile sub-ledgers to the GL, tie out bank statements, and assemble the support binder so month-end close is review, not re-keying.
IT & access operations
Resolve provisioning, reset, and entitlement tickets end to end, and pre-stage quarterly access reviews with the evidence reviewers need.
Controls & evidence
Generate control evidence as work happens — three-way-match proofs, approval chains, and SoD attestations queryable on demand.
From swivel-chair to supervised agent
We pick one high-volume, rules-heavy process, prove the controls, then expand.
Map
We document the process as it actually runs — every system, hand-off, exception, and control point — not the policy diagram.
Control
With your internal audit team we set the approval gates, SoD boundaries, and risk thresholds before any agent acts.
Pilot
The agent runs in production under supervision, clearing real volume while every action is logged and reviewed.
Scale
We widen autonomy as the evidence accrues, then move to the next process in the queue.
Segregation of duties an agent can't break
The fastest way to fail an audit is to let an automation hold one super-account that can create a vendor and pay it. We don't do that. Agents act under scoped service identities, and segregation of duties is enforced in the orchestration layer — conflicting steps are structurally routed to different actors and approvers.
Financial actions — posting to the GL, releasing a payment, granting an entitlement — pass through a named human gate by default. Everything an agent sees, decides, and does is captured as lineage, so a control owner can answer 'why did this happen?' in seconds, not a quarter-end scramble.
- Scoped service identities, never a person's login
- SoD enforced in orchestration, not on the honor system
- Named-approver gates on every financial action
- Queryable lineage that maps to control evidence
RPA bots vs. operations agents
Why screen-scraping macros and an agentic ops layer aren't the same tool.
| A legacy RPA bot | An Automatic.co ops agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Exceptions | Breaks and stops the queue | Reasons through them or escalates with context |
| UI changes | Snaps when a screen moves | Works through APIs and adapts |
| Controls | Often runs as a shared admin | Scoped identity, SoD, approval gates |
| Audit | Logs clicks, not decisions | Full decision lineage as evidence |
| Scope | One screen, one step | End-to-end across every system |
Frequently asked questions
Will agents touch our system of record, or just stage work for a human?
You decide per workflow. Low-risk steps — matching, coding, drafting, reconciling — run autonomously; anything that posts to the GL, releases a payment, or changes an entitlement can require a named approver. The default for SOX-relevant actions is human-in-the-loop, and you can tighten or loosen each gate as trust builds.
How does this satisfy our auditors and SOX controls?
Every agent action is logged with the inputs it saw, the rule or model it applied, the systems it touched, and who approved it. That lineage maps directly to control evidence, so your three-way-match or access-review control has a complete, queryable trail instead of a screenshot folder. We design the controls with your internal audit team before go-live.
We have segregation-of-duties rules. Can an agent respect them?
Yes — agents operate under scoped service identities, not a person's credentials, and we enforce SoD in the orchestration layer so the same agent can't both create a vendor and approve its first payment. Conflicting steps route to different approvers, and the audit log proves the separation held.
How quickly can we automate one process end to end?
A well-scoped workflow — say invoice-to-match or new-hire provisioning — typically goes from mapping to a supervised production pilot in a few weeks. We start with one high-volume, rules-heavy process, prove the controls and the ROI, then expand to the next.
Operations across regulated functions
We run the same controlled-automation playbook in the industries with the tightest oversight.
Bring your messiest process. Leave with a controlled plan.
One working session to map a back-office workflow end to end and the gates that keep it audit-ready.