We Drove Our Own Expense Process Close to Full Autonomy

What we walked through

1. 01

   Design it on a green field

   Before: receipts on paper, handwritten notes, and finance chasing everyone at the end of the month before the tax advisor deadline. We ignored how it worked and modelled the ideal: snap a photo of the receipt, drop it in a chat, done. The agent labels, classifies and matches it against payments.

2. 02

   Weekly runs instead of monthly panic

   An agent runs every week, collects missing receipts and unpaid invoices, and reminds the right people. The end-of-month scramble simply stops existing.

3. 03

   The agent lane as the red line

   We broke our own best practice and gave the agent a dedicated lane next to the humans. It makes the boundary of autonomy visible, and it is where the hard conversations happened.

4. 04

   The diagram as the spec

   We handed the diagram to our two developers as the specification. Almost no back-and-forth, almost no open questions. The explicitness did the work a requirements document never does.

5. 05

   Agents that document themselves

   Each agent reports what it does back into the BPMN model. The audit trail builds itself, and when something misbehaves you can see exactly where.

6. 06

   Train on the standard cases, route the rest

   Expense rules get complicated fast. Train the agent on the 50 to 80 percent that is routine, and send everything else to human review. Add review steps as compliance demands.