When an owner wants control over a process, the instinct is to funnel everything through one trusted person. But the gatekeeper usually isn't the one who understands the work, so you've built a bottleneck who's guessing. The fix is an old accounting idea: separate the person who does the work from the person who approves it. Two roles, two people.
Read more →When a business brings me a problem, the reflex is to reach for something new: build an app, bolt on an AI tool, buy another subscription. My first move is the opposite. Most companies use a fraction of their ERP, and AI's most useful trick isn't building new software. It's helping you finally use the expensive system you already own.
Read more →The most deliberate decision in my AP invoice agent is the one that looks like a missing feature: the public demo won't let you upload a real invoice. Governance and data security aren't a compliance step you bolt on at the end. They're design decisions you make while you build, and the businesses that will trust AI with real work are the ones that decided up front what it's allowed to touch.
Read more →I built an AI agent that processes vendor invoices on its own. I expected the hard part to be the reasoning. It wasn't. The model reasons fine. The hard part was deciding what it was not allowed to do, and that turned out to be a controls problem more than an AI one.
Read more →Certificates of insurance, W-9s, safety data sheets, lien releases. The vendor documents nobody thinks about until one is missing at a closing, an audit, or a claim. The mistake is treating them as a filing task. They're not a filing problem. They're a deadline problem, and a folder doesn't track deadlines.
Read more →An operator's take on where AI actually fits in a small or mid-market business, and where it doesn't. You don't have a Microsoft Excel strategy. You have a finance team that uses Excel for the things Excel is good for, and uses other tools for the things Excel isn't good for. The same posture is the right one for AI.
Read more →When I scope a project with a new client, the first question I ask isn't "what should we build?" or "what should we fix?" It's "what happens when I'm not here anymore?" Most consulting doesn't plan for the consultant's departure. The work I do is supposed to be the client's when I leave, whether that's a written close procedure, a software upgrade plan, a new file layout, or a custom application with a departure checklist.
Read more →Past a certain size, vendor management stops being a relationship managed by a person and starts being a system managed by software. The damage from a fragmented vendor system rarely shows up as a single dramatic failure — it shows up as a steady tax on everything around it.
Read more →Every piece of business software is built for a general case. But your business isn't the general case. The distance between what your software was designed to do and what your business actually needs it to do is exactly where time gets lost and good people end up doing manual work that should have been automated years ago.
Read more →There's a version of this story I hear often. A department head needs to know where a project stands. A controller wants to pull vendor spend by category. Simple questions, in theory. But in practice, getting the answer requires the right person who knows how to pull it — and probably a few hours of waiting.
Read more →There's a version of "getting by" that looks fine from the outside. Invoices go out. Payroll runs. Reports get built. But if you pull back the curtain, you'll often find someone spending three hours every Friday doing something a computer should have done in three minutes.
Read more →Most companies are running on a patchwork of workarounds. A spreadsheet for payroll. A separate system for job costing. An email chain for approvals. It gets the job done — until it doesn't.
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