How the work runs.
There is no proprietary methodology here and no framework with a name. There is a short list of things we insist on, most of which exist because ignoring them is how automation projects go wrong.
Watch the work, not the diagram
Every process description is tidier than the process. We build from what people actually do, including the spreadsheet nobody mentions and the step that only happens when a particular person is in.
Name the control before removing the step
For each manual action, we establish what check it was carrying. If we cannot answer that, we are not ready to automate it. This is the discipline a software vendor has no reason to apply.
Build on what you own
The first question is what your existing systems can already do that nobody switched on. Replacing platforms is expensive, slow, and usually beside the point — the process layer is where the time goes.
Exceptions are the product
A good automation is judged by the quality of the queue it leaves behind. If a person still reviews everything, nothing was gained; if nothing reaches a person, something is being hidden.
Leave it operable without us
Documentation, the rules in readable form, and a handover that assumes we are not here. A dependency on us is a worse outcome than the manual process we replaced.
Say when it is not worth it
Low volumes, unstable inputs, or a process about to change anyway. A plan that recommends against automating something is doing its job, not failing at it.
After the Review
The Finance Automation Review ends with a plan and no obligation. If you decide to build from it, the work runs in short, separately quoted stages — one process at a time, each one live and stable before the next one starts.
That sequencing is deliberate rather than commercial. Automating three processes simultaneously means that when something behaves unexpectedly — and something always does in the first cycle — you are debugging three changes at once, during a period when the finance team still has a month end to deliver.
What a stage looks like
- The rules written down and agreed before anything is built, in language your team can check.
- Built and tested against your real historical data, not against samples.
- Run in parallel with the manual process for at least one full cycle, comparing outputs.
- Cut over only when the parallel run agrees, with the manual process still available.
- Documented, handed over, and operable by your team without us.
Where we work
The work is delivered remotely and the practice works across time zones; the process problems described on this site are the same in Manchester, Dubai and Singapore. Where local regulation sets the timetable — an e-invoicing mandate, a new filing obligation — that becomes part of the sequencing rather than a separate workstream.
What does change by jurisdiction is the compliance detail sitting underneath a process. Where that is outside our own licensed scope, we will say so and work alongside your local adviser rather than around them.
Who does the work
Designed and delivered by an ACCA-licensed accountancy practice, not a software vendor. That matters most at the point where a process is being redesigned rather than merely rebuilt — when the question stops being “how do we make this faster” and becomes “what was this step protecting, and how do we keep it”.
Start with the Review.
One week, fixed fee, ending in a ranked build plan that is yours whatever you decide to do next.