Measure the Cost of the Financial Close and Identify Where to Reduce It
Pyze measures how accounts payable, receivable, reconciliation and reporting work is performed, and prices what agents and automation can take out.
Engagement archetypes from Pyze deployments across shared services and finance operations rather than a single named account.
Finance operations has automated the transaction and kept the exception. Invoice queries, reconciliation breaks, dunning correspondence and the manual assembly of period reporting are handled by people in spreadsheets and inboxes, and none of it appears in the ERP.
Common Findings in Finance Operations
Four patterns that recur across engagements, each shown with the measurement and the resulting change.
Straight-through processing rates are high, but headcount has not decreased.
SimplifyThe rate is calculated on invoices that entered the workflow cleanly. The exceptions are worked outside it and are not in the denominator.
Exception effort is measured and decomposed by cause, which gives the first view of what the process costs.
The close takes as long as it did five years ago.
AutomateMost of the elapsed time is waiting and checking rather than working, and the checking repeats across systems that already agree.
Repeat verification is consolidated and the deterministic assembly removed, which shortens the critical path rather than the effort on it.
Supplier and customer queries absorb the team every month end.
AgentifyThe answer usually exists in the ledger and is being retrieved and rewritten by a person for each query.
Queries answered from the record, with genuine disputes escalated already evidenced.
Reconciliation breaks are cleared by whoever knows the account.
StandardizeBreak causes concentrate in recurring patterns, and the clearing knowledge sits with individuals rather than in a procedure.
The clearing path is documented from what the best performers do, then the recurring causes are automated.
Opportunity Register
A sample register, sorted by the lever that resolves each opportunity. In an engagement, each line carries measured hours, a named owner and the evidence it was derived from.
Systems typically instrumented
Capture covers browser-delivered and thick-client applications, including virtualized estates, with no change to how anyone works.
Roles Involved
Instrumentation is configured per application rather than per person, so the population in scope is set during scoping and is not a deployment constraint.
How an Engagement Runs
Baseline, blueprint, transform, prove
The same four stages apply in every sector. The fourth stage repeats the baseline measurement, which makes the engagement an ongoing operating capability rather than a one-time report.
Baseline
What the work costs today, measured across every person and application.
Blueprint
Procedures, application rules and execution evidence, read as one target state.
Transform
Where each of the five levers applies, priced and owned.
Prove
The after state measured against the baseline, using the same method.
Frequently Asked Questions
We already have process mining on the ERP. What does this add?
Can this support a shared services productivity commitment?
Industries
Other functions
Related
Start with a measured baseline
Six weeks from instrumentation to a priced opportunity register, and the baseline stays in place so later quarters are measured rather than re-estimated.