Explain the movement
Margin down two points is decomposed into the customers, products, projects, vendors, and labour categories responsible, ranked by contribution to the change.
AI agents · finance
It answers the question a CFO actually gets asked — why did gross margin move — by walking the transactions rather than by summarising a chart. It operates at Level 0 and 1, because analysis that cannot be argued with is worse than no analysis.
What it does
Each of these is work a person does today. The agent does them in sequence and stops at the first thing it is not confident about.
Margin down two points is decomposed into the customers, products, projects, vendors, and labour categories responsible, ranked by contribution to the change.
From open receivables weighted by that customer’s actual payment behaviour, committed payables, payroll, and contracted recurring revenue — not from a straight-line extrapolation.
Hiring plans, price changes, a lost account, a delayed collection. Each modelled against the real cost base rather than against a percentage assumption.
Statements, variance commentary, KPI movement, and the two or three things that changed materially — as a first draft you edit rather than assemble.
A customer concentration creeping up, a vendor whose pricing drifted, a project trending over. The things that do not appear in a report because nobody built one for them.
Ask why professional services margin fell in the Austin office last quarter and get an answer with the transactions attached rather than a chart to interpret.
Authority
Almost everything this agent does. Nothing changes, nothing posts, and no approval is required because there is nothing to approve.
Board packs, commentary, and lender reporting prepared for review. A person edits and owns what goes out under their name.
This agent has no write access to the ledger at all. It is an analytical role, and giving analysis the ability to change the numbers it analyses is a category error.
Every ERP has dashboards, and they answer the question of what happened. The question a CFO is actually asked in a board meeting is why — and the gap between those two is a week of somebody’s analysis, repeated monthly, mostly re-deriving the same decomposition.
Because every transaction carries its dimensions and links back to the contract, project, and vendor behind it, the decomposition is a traversal rather than an investigation. Margin moved two points; here are the eleven things that contributed, ranked, with the largest being one customer whose mix shifted toward a lower-margin service line.
Most cash forecasts age receivables on invoice terms, which assumes customers pay when they agreed to. They do not, and the variance is not random — each customer has a stable personal habit that is usually more predictive than the contract.
Weighting each open invoice by that customer’s own payment history produces a forecast that is materially better than a terms-based one, and it degrades gracefully: a customer with no history is weighted on terms and flagged as an assumption rather than silently included.
This agent has no write access to the ledger whatsoever — not at Level 1, not with any configuration. An analytical agent that could adjust the numbers it reports on would be unsound in a way no audit trail could repair, so the capability simply does not exist.
It also does not make recommendations dressed as conclusions. It will tell you that margin fell because of a mix shift at one account; whether that is a pricing problem, a delivery problem, or a deliberate strategy is a judgement it does not have the context to make, and pretending otherwise would make the useful parts less trustworthy.
Questions
Two periods of ledger data and one real question is enough to see what it produces.