Next Gen System
Case 03 New York FINOPS · BOT AUTOMATION
Back-Office Bot Automation for Reconciliations
Attended and unattended bots that clear high-volume finance tasks with visible failures.
01 — Context
The Client’s Story
Ops analysts spent nights copy-pasting between portals—matching settlements, downloading reports, and updating spreadsheets. The work was rules-heavy and repetitive, but never quite identical enough for a one-click export.
Errors were silent until month-end close. A missed portal pull or a wrong filter could sit unnoticed for days, then surface as a scramble when finance needed numbers locked.
The team was open to automation—but only if bots failed loudly. Leadership had seen “happy path” RPA that skipped rows without raising a hand, and they refused to trade one risk for another.
02 — Ambition
Objectives
Automate the repetitive portal and spreadsheet steps with credential vaulting, so analysts stop sharing passwords on shared desktops.
Fail loudly with alerts and exception queues—never silent skips—so every incomplete run has an owner and a screenshot trail.
Return analyst time to true exception investigation instead of overnight copy-paste packs.
03 — Friction
Challenges
Two vendor portals had brittle UIs and no stable APIs. Selectors drifted after minor vendor releases.
Shared desktops and weak credential hygiene made any bot deployment a security conversation first.
Fear that bots would hide errors instead of surfacing them shaped every design review and acceptance test.
04 — Approach
Solution
We implemented bot automation for the top reconciliation flows: attended bots for hybrid steps where a human still confirms edge cases, and unattended bots for overnight packs.
Credentials live in a vault. Every run logs screenshots and outcomes. Exceptions land in a queue with owners, SLAs, and enough context to replay the failure without guessing.
Runbooks document selector risk, retry policy, and who owns a vendor UI change. Ops can adjust packs without calling engineering for every calendar tweak.
05 — Outcomes
Results
Settled, rules-heavy packs stopped consuming nights—and close-cycle surprises from missed portal pulls became rare enough to notice when they happened.
- Hours returned each week on settled, rules-heavy packs.
- Fewer close-cycle surprises from missed portal pulls.
- Clear runbooks so ops can own bot changes without a fire drill.
06 — Forward
What’s Next
Layer process automation orchestration across the full close checklist so bots, approvals, and human exceptions sit on one visible path instead of scattered trackers.
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