Fourteen agent skills for a finance back office

The problem

The finance function at an engineering company lives across three places that don’t talk to each other: the CRM where the deal is won, the ERP where the money is booked, and the spreadsheet where someone tries to see the whole picture. What’s left for the person is typing — re-entering into one system what is already written in another.

Automating that is tempting and dangerous in equal measure, because the error doesn’t show up at the time. A duplicated receivable breaks nothing: it simply makes the month close wrong, weeks later, when nobody remembers what ran.

The rule that organizes everything

Every skill separates the phase that reads from the phase that writes. The read builds the picture and lays out a table of what it intends to do. The write only happens after a person types “yes” while looking at that table.

That isn’t safety decoration; it is what determines how many skills exist. Of the fourteen, ten never write anywhere — they produce a report, a local file, or a PDF. Only four touch a system, and they are exactly the four that stop to ask for authorization.

The one that posts receivables also carries a deduplication lock: the key is written onto the ERP record itself, so running twice cannot create two entries. Every skill stops at the first error rather than leaving half the work committed — partial state is worse than a declared failure.

What they cover

The whole cycle, from sales to close: a won deal in the CRM becoming a customer and a receivable in the ERP; matching the bank statement against the ledger; a month-end checklist that reconciles to the cent; classifying projects and forecasting the month each one will be invoiced; a 30/60/90-day cash projection; a recurring-cost audit hunting for silent price increases; and reading the inbox to turn pending items into task cards.

They share their calibration: credentials validated by one become available to the others, and each skill’s first run asks for what’s missing instead of demanding a hand-written config file. No secret lives in the repository — only in an environment variable on the operator’s machine, and it is never printed into the conversation.

What I still cannot claim

They have not run in production. They are written, reviewed and installable, and the test with the person who runs finance has been postponed more than once. So there is no hours-saved figure here, and I am not going to estimate one: that would be inventing the one thing this site promises never to invent.

What can be checked today is the design — how many write, how many don’t, and what each one demands before it commits. When the test runs, the production number goes in.