AI agents for finance and back office
Rylen finds those hours the way a CFO does — by listening to how your business actually runs — then builds agents that take the repetitive work off your people and give them their week back.
The Rylen repetition model
An illustrative 80-person company
Rylen’s own model, not an industry statistic — an 80-person company across purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, close, reporting and administration. Your figures come from your own intake, not from this.
The playbooks
A practical CFO field guide to finding the repetitive work inside a finance function, deciding what an agent can safely carry, and deciding — on the record — what should stay human. A sixteen-page PDF. It is the method Rylen runs, written down in full so that you can put it to work yourself.
Sixteen pages built to help you make automation decisions, not just read about them. The scoring model and a worked example so the numbers are not abstract, five limits for what should never be automated, the six readiness conditions and what each unlocks, a framework for running a pilot a board believes, how the evaluator works, and the governance documents your auditor will expect. Then three worksheets you can print and put to work. Nothing withheld.
The free chapter is chapter four, What to never automate — the one to read twice. Licensed for use inside your own organisation. If you read it and decide you would rather have it done for you, the price of the guide comes off the diagnostic.
A hands-on workbook for identifying repetitive finance work, scoring the opportunities, and deciding what to pilot. It takes the worksheets from the guide and turns them into practical tools you can complete and use.
The control documents you need to show what each finance agent does, what it can access, who approves its actions, and how its performance is monitored — giving auditors, lenders and your board a clear record of how automation is governed.
All three
The method, the worksheets to run it, and the documents to defend it. Everything Rylen uses inside a finance function, in one download.
Two ways in
The method is the same either way. The difference is whose hours go into it.
The problem
It is not that your people are slow. It is that a large part of every week is the same task, done again, with the answer already known before it starts.
That is four full-time equivalents of a mid-market back office, spent on work nobody wants and nobody is proud of.
Your business
Every function, not just finance. Set it to your business and the model underneath is the same one I use in an engagement — repetitive hours by function, discounted by how much of each an agent can honestly carry.
Total headcount · 12.0 of them in the functions selected
Fully loaded — salary, burden and overhead
Finance
The rest of the business
Nothing in scope. Switch a function back on.
Hours shown are per week, across the functions you selected. Recoverable hours assume 20% residual oversight — an agent that owns a process still gets reviewed. This is an estimate to argue with, not a quote.
What Rylen does
Most automation projects start with the technology and then look for ways to use it. This approach starts with your business, identifies where automation makes sense, and recognises when work is better left with your people. And the CFO work itself sits alongside it, whenever you want it.
I sit with your business and hear how it genuinely operates — strategy, procedures, policies — and read it the way a CFO reads a company, not the way a vendor reads a requirements document.
Agents that work inside your own systems — your ERP, your AP and AR ledgers, your bank, your document store — carrying defined work end to end rather than suggesting what a person should do next.
Every agent is tested by a dedicated evaluator before it touches anything live, and reviewed after. Nothing goes near a payment or a journal entry on trust alone.
Cash flow, forecasting, FP&A, controllership and close, custom dashboards, business health and diligence support — the numbers themselves, whenever you need them. Plenty of engagements start here, because it is the fastest way for me to see how a business really runs.
The engagement
I spend time with the people doing the work and the people accountable for it. What gets repeated, what gets escalated, what everyone works around. This is the part most projects skip, and it is the part that decides whether the rest is worth doing.
Every repeated process gets scored on the things that actually determine whether an agent can own it — how much judgment it needs, how structured its inputs are, how often it hits an exception. You get hours, dollars and an honest verdict on each one, including the ones that should stay with people.
One agent, one well-understood process, under review, with a measured before and after. The point is not the agent. It is the evidence that funds the next five.
I deploy the roles your readiness has unlocked, in the order the plan sets, each inside your own systems and each with a defined scope, a review cadence and an owner on your side.
Review cadence, audit trail, and a written rule for which judgments stay with a person permanently. This is what makes the whole thing defensible to your auditors, your lenders and your board.
The agent team
Not one general-purpose assistant. Defined roles, each with its own scope, its own systems and its own limits — the way you would structure a department if you were hiring one. The nine below are architectures already built and running. They are a starting point, not a catalogue.
Reads strategy, policy and board material with a CFO's eye. Frames the capital and risk questions leadership should be asking.
Owns the management reporting cycle end to end — consolidation, pack assembly, commentary — and delivers it finished.
Refreshes the driver-based forecast against actuals, writes the variance explanations, models scenarios on request.
Orchestrates the close, runs reconciliations, chases what is outstanding, escalates only genuine exceptions.
Prepares and reviews recurring journals, accrual schedules and intercompany entries against documented thresholds.
Captures and codes invoices, runs the three-way match, resolves routine mismatches, prepares the payment run for approval.
Issues invoices, sequences collections by risk and age, applies cash, flags accounts heading for trouble before they age out.
Handles coding, filing, expense review and vendor data — the recurring administrative work that eats junior time.
Tests every other agent before and after it goes live — scopes the test, scores the output, reports findings. Nothing deploys without passing it.
Whatever the work is, in whatever function. If it repeats and has a defined outcome, it can be designed — and if it needs a shape nobody has built before, that is the interesting part of the job.
No fixed catalogue
Anything is possible. These are simply the ones already proven.
Single agents or multi-agent systems. Architectures get designed around your business and your systems, not selected from a list — and not limited to finance. Anywhere work repeats with a defined outcome, an agent can be built to carry it.
What changes
Nothing here is a system replacement. The work moves. Your ledger, your systems and the people accountable for the numbers all stay exactly where they are.
The last row is the one that matters. Somebody still checks the work. It is simply no longer the same person who did it.
The limit
A diagnostic that finds automation everywhere it looks is not a diagnostic. Part of what you are paying for is the verdict that a process should stay exactly where it is.
Each of these comes back in the diagnostic as a written verdict with the reason attached. You get the list of what should stay with your people alongside the list of what should not, and the first is often the more useful of the two.
Readiness
Six conditions decide it. I score them before anything is built, because a business that scores badly here will not get value from agents no matter how good the agents are — and you deserve to hear that before you spend.
Can an agent be given its own authenticated, logged, revocable access to your core systems?
An agent amplifies whatever the data already is. Feed it a reconciliation problem and you get a faster one.
Undocumented work cannot be handed over, because there is nothing to hand over.
This decides whether an agent can go near a payment or a journal entry. Without it, the answer is no.
Agents are reliable on the ordinary case and need a defined route out of the unusual one.
Adoption fails here more often than technology does. An agent nobody trusts gets quietly worked around.
Score yourself — nothing is sent anywhere
Answered honestly, this is the same six-condition model I run in an engagement. The full version scores every driver and maps each one to the agents it gates.
Who this is for
Typically $10M to $250M in revenue, where the finance function is big enough to carry real repetition and small enough that changing it is still possible.
About
You are not buying a methodology from a firm that will send someone junior. You are buying a finance leader who builds these systems himself and has had to sign the numbers at the end of them.
Founder
Leonard (Lenny) F. Knobbs III
I have spent my career inside finance functions, from controller to CFO, and one thing has always stood out. A significant part of every week goes to the same repetitive work, following the same steps to reach an outcome that was largely predictable before it started.
Last year I decided to do something about it. I built an AI finance team to take that work off my own desk — nine roles, from CFO through accounting associate, plus an evaluator that tests each agent before it touches anything live. I did not build it to create a product. I built it because I had work that needed to get done. I tested the agents against real month-end processes, learned where they fell short, and kept refining them until they performed reliably. The evaluator came from that experience too: early versions could make mistakes that were easy to miss, so I built a way to catch them before anyone relied on the output.
That hands-on experience matters, because building effective finance agents takes an understanding of both the finance and the technology behind it. Most people working on agentic finance come from one side — engineers who have never closed a set of books, or finance people who have never built anything that runs. I work on both. An MBA in Finance and Organizational Development and a BSBA in Accounting from La Salle University, a career of controller and CFO seats across manufacturing and international groups, today the CFO of a $100M international orthopedic implant manufacturer, and an executive program in agentic AI through the Harvard Data Science Initiative. I designed, built, tested and still govern every agent running in my own finance function.
Rylen brings that experience directly to your business. The first thing I do is listen. Then I identify the repetitive work costing your team time, decide what can safely be handled by agents and what should stay human, and build, test and govern the agents that make sense for you. The goal is not to automate everything. It is to remove the right work from your team’s plate while keeping the right controls and human judgment in place. Some processes should stay with people permanently, and saying so out loud is what makes everything else credible.
The obvious question
Every CFO weighing this up asks it, and most do not ask it out loud. One person is a real risk, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong way to start. So here is how the work is built, so that the risk sits with me rather than with you.
Alongside the agents
The agent build is the main event. But the same CFO judgment that finds the repetition also does the work — and plenty of clients start here, because it is the fastest way for me to see how a business really runs.
13-week rolling forecasts, confidence ranges, working capital and covenant headroom. Built so it survives contact with a lender or a board.
Driver-based operating models, scenario and sensitivity analysis, budgets that reconcile to the plan and to the ledger.
Management reporting packs, variance analysis with explanations that hold up, KPI design, and unit economics that mean something.
One connected view of the business, built on your own ledger — cash, performance, forecast and health in one place, refreshed without anyone assembling it by hand. Built around the decisions you actually make, not a template.
Close acceleration, reconciliation discipline, technical accounting positions, and getting an audit through without drama.
Scored health assessments, working capital reviews, and buy-side or sell-side support when something is being bought or sold.
Fractional CFO cover, systems selection, policy and procedure design, board and lender reporting. If it sits on a CFO's desk, it can sit on ours.
Some engagements begin with agents and add the CFO work. Others begin with a dashboard or a cash flow model and turn into an agent build once I can see where the hours go. Both routes end up in the same place.
If your data is not ready, I will say so and tell you what to fix first. If a process should stay with a person, it stays with a person. If the hours are not there, there is no engagement worth selling you.
Start here
No deck, no demo, no obligation. We talk through where the repetition sits, and you leave with a view on whether agents are worth it for you — including if the answer is not yet.