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Use caseEvidence: Real case

A CFO explains how their team reconciles prepaid expenses with an AI agent: from 2 hours to 5 minutes

Summary: The author of the OnlyCFO newsletter, who runs an accounting team, describes the agent they built to reconcile prepaid expenses against their ERP’s general ledger. According to them, it went from about 2 hours of human work to about 5 minutes, and the same pattern took a day off the monthly close.

Published on 2 min read498 words

Four-step diagram: a Slack command reaches the AI agent, which reads the ERP general ledger and prepares a draft workpaper and journal entry that a human preparer and reviewer post.
Our own diagram of the flow the author describes.Image: Agents Finance · Own work

What they do and how

An agent prepares the monthly prepaid expense reconciliation. When it receives the command from Slack, it queries the ERP general ledger directly through MCP, finds the previous month’s workpaper, copies it to the current close folder and updates it with the new items and the amortization month, keeping the Excel formulas. When it finishes, it posts a summary in Slack with the workpaper, a CSV with the proposed journal entry and a mention of the preparer. The agent does not post the entry: there is still a human preparer and a reviewer.

Reported result

Stated by the author: from about 2 hours of human work to about 5 minutes, with more than 90% of the steps done by the agent, and the same pattern applied to other processes “took a full day” off the monthly close. The first run took more time, and afterwards the team kept refining the skill and the configuration. The article gives no per-process figures.

Stated figures. An identified person or organization states that they have used it. The results are stated by the source; we have not audited them.

What has really been tested

According to the author, their team uses it in production. They do not publish the contents of the skill or the configuration, do not identify the ERP and do not measure the savings of the other processes. We have not reproduced the flow. A reader commented on the risk of prompt injection: the agent reads external text (supplier names, invoice descriptions), has access to sensitive data and can write to systems; human review comes after the agent has already acted.

How to replicate it

Pick a repetitive reconciliation with a monthly workpaper. Split what the author describes into two pieces: a skill (the procedure, which hardly changes) and a configuration file (ledger accounts, supplier-to-account map, materiality threshold, partial-month convention, who to notify). Connect the agent to the ERP and the workpaper folder in read mode at first, and let it prepare the draft without posting. Keep a human preparer and reviewer, and adjust the skill every time you correct something that repeats.

The flow, step by step

Flow diagram: Slack command, MCP read of the ERP general ledger, update of the previous month’s workpaper and Slack summary; a human posts the entry.
The agent’s flow according to the OnlyCFO author. Our own simplified diagram, with no real data.

The diagram summarizes the steps the author describes: the command arrives from Slack, the agent queries the ERP general ledger through MCP, starts from the previous month’s workpaper and posts the result in Slack with a notice to the preparer. The two pieces (the skill and the configuration file) are the part their team keeps fine-tuning.

Important nuances

  • This is one person’s experience at their company, told in a newsletter. The figures have not been audited.
  • The article mentions a specific ERP only as an example when defining what MCP is; it does not claim it is theirs.
  • That the agent does not post the entry is a control decision by the author, not a technical limitation stated in the text.

Sources

We wrote this entry in our own words from the sources above and checked that the links worked on October 17, 2026. Is anything incorrect? Tell us.

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