AI agents · finance

Build an agent for the workflow only you have

Every business has one process that no vendor builds for — a reconciliation against a bespoke settlement file, an allocation nobody else needs, a compliance check specific to your industry. Custom agents run on the same tools, the same policy engine, and the same audit schema, which is what stops a bespoke agent from becoming an exception to your controls.

policy · ap_autopostdraft v5

Post a coded vendor bill automatically when all of these hold:

Simulated against your last quarter — 1,284 bills
603 posted automatically
681 held
Balanced. Most customers settle around here.
Simulation runs before the policy is enabled. You see what it would have done last quarter, not what it might do next.
Same policy engineSame audit schemaHosted and versioned by us

What it does

Six jobs, end to end.

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.

Same tool surface

A custom agent reads and proposes through the same typed interfaces as the built-in ones. It cannot reach anything the AP agent could not, which is what bounds its blast radius.

Same policy engine

Its proposals are evaluated by the same deterministic engine against policies your controller authors. There is no bespoke enforcement path to review separately.

Same authority model

Levels 0 to 4, granted by an administrator, with the same four actions absent entirely. A custom agent cannot release funds or close a period either.

Same audit schema

Model, context, sources, reasoning, confidence, policy, approver, resulting entry. Your auditor sees one schema, not one per agent.

Same evaluation harness

Straight-through rate and confidently-wrong rate measured against your corrections, with the same regression gates blocking a change that makes it worse.

Hosted and maintained

Built and run by us as a module rather than handed over as code you then own. Build fee plus monthly hosting, versioned like everything else.

Authority

Where this agent sits, and who decides.

Level 1 · always first

Draft for a quarter

Every custom agent starts here regardless of how mechanical the workflow looks. The first quarter is where the corpus and your confidence are built.

Level 2 · if earned

Execute in policy

Only once accuracy is measured and a policy simulated against history. The same bar as a built-in agent, not a lower one because you commissioned it.

Never

Bespoke exceptions

We will not build an agent that bypasses the policy engine, writes to the ledger directly, or logs to a separate schema — regardless of what it would cost you to ask for.

What makes a good candidate

The workflows that work well as custom agents share a shape: high volume, repetitive, document or data driven, with a decision that can be checked against a rule or a history. The ones that do not work involve genuine judgement, low volume, or a decision nobody can articulate the basis for.

Good candidates we have built: reconciling a payment processor settlement file with a bespoke format, checking subcontractor compliance documents against expiry rules, allocating a shared cost across entities using a formula specific to a partnership agreement, and validating a royalty calculation against contract terms.

If you cannot articulate the basis on which the decision is made, an agent cannot learn it — and building one anyway produces confident output on an unarticulated rule.

Why we host rather than hand over

The obvious alternative is to build it and give you the code. We do not, and the reason is not commercial lock-in — it is that an agent handed over stops being governed. It falls outside the evaluation harness, the regression gates, and the audit schema, and a year later nobody knows whether it still behaves.

Hosting means it is versioned, monitored, and measured like the built-in agents, and when a model changes it is re-evaluated against your corpus rather than quietly drifting. You pay a monthly fee for that, and you can export everything it has produced at any point.

What it costs

Build is quoted at the published rate — API cost times five with a $5,000 floor — after a scoping session. Hosting runs $250 to $1,000 a month depending on volume and complexity. Most custom agents land between $8,000 and $25,000 to build.

We will also tell you when the answer is not an agent. A workflow running twice a month is almost never worth automating, and a rule that never changes is a policy rather than an agent — cheaper, more predictable, and it does not need an evaluation harness.

Questions

What people ask first.

Can we build one ourselves?
You can build against the API and MCP server. Custom agents inside the governance model — sharing the policy engine, audit schema, and evaluation harness — are built by us, because those guarantees are ours to make.
Do custom agents get the same controls?
Identical. Same authority levels, same policy engine, same audit schema, same four permanently absent actions. A bespoke agent that bypassed any of those would be a hole in your control framework.
What if we want it to do something you would not allow?
We will decline. We will not build an agent that writes to the ledger directly, releases funds, or logs separately, at any price — those constraints are what make the rest of the system defensible.
How long does one take?
Three to six weeks from scoping to a Level 1 deployment, then a quarter at draft before any authority increase is considered.
What happens if we leave?
You export everything it produced in open formats. The agent itself is a hosted module and stops running, which is the same arrangement as any other hosted software.

Describe the workflow only you have.

We will tell you whether an agent fits, what it costs, and when a simple rule would serve you better.