Most finance work is reconstructing the story
For finance AI to work, we need a context layer. Without it, agents are just guessing.
Picture the following:
New PO lands in the inbox. Check ERP. No match. Search email threads for a reference. CRM for the order. Portal to confirm status. Upload invoice. Rejected. Fix. Resubmit.
For many finance operators, this is the job: reconstructing the story across systems.
Some of this can be fixed with good process. But a lot of it is just the reality of order to cash and accounts receivable work. It touches internal and external systems, involves multiple teams, and depends on customers who each have their own procurement rules, portals, approval workflows, and payment calendars. External factors outside of your control.
As the business grows, internal systems tend to multiply. Different ERPs across geographies, CRMs, billing and AR systems, additional procurement portals to deal with. Each adding yet another place where context lives. And so information you need ends up increasingly fragmented. Hiring and onboarding new team members means training them on all this.
There are different ways to frame where this context sits. Here's one:
Transactional context: The data records. Invoices, payments, credit notes, POs, contracts. What lives in your ERP, systems of record and what you're constantly cross-referencing.
Customer context: How each customer operates. Their portal workflows, PO requirements, payment calendars, compliance needs. The gap between what's contracted and what their AP team actually does. Who to call when something's stuck. Communicated in email chains, phone calls, CRM notes, and finance spreadsheets.
Operational context: How your teams work. Who handles what, when to escalate, where to log notes, what processes to follow. Your systems (ERP, CRM, billing tools, etc.) and how they connect. The internal operating procedures and systems workflows.
Precedent context: Past decisions that can inform future ones. Why terms were extended, who approved the exception, what resolved the dispute last time. Rarely written down, but often referenced in conversation.
This is why most order-to-cash tasks start the same way: gather the pieces, reconstruct the picture, then act.
In the future, finance teams will have systems that unify all of this context (transactional, customer, operational, precedent) into a single layer. Not another dashboard. A system that can prioritize what you should be looking at and surfaces the relevant context from different systems in one place, for every decision. For agents to effectively complete finance work, nuanced context on every customer is essential.