Discovery Questions and Value Mapping
Imagine you're meeting with a finance leader interested in AI for financial close. The temptation is to immediately explain the technology. However, the most successful conversations begin with questions, not answers.
By asking the right discovery questions, you can uncover inefficiencies, identify risks, and understand where the close process depends on manual effort. These insights allow you to position the value of the Financial Closing Assistant in a way that is meaningful to the customer.
Let's explore some key discovery questions and the business value they help uncover.
When your existing automation breaks down — due to an unusual document structure, a missing field, or an unanticipated entity pair — who picks it up, and how much close time does that consume per period?
Agentic AI handles situations that were never pre-programmed. Unlike rule-based automation, the Financial Closing Assistant observes the data, evaluates patterns, and proposes an action with a visible explanation — eliminating the manual fallback that today absorbs skilled accountant hours during the most time-pressured days of the period.
How many close tasks — receivables clearing, intercompany reconciliation, accrual postings — run sequentially today because they depend on a person completing the previous step before the next one begins?
AI agents run in parallel and simultaneously. Clearing, intercompany matching, and journal entry preparation all progress at the same time without waiting for the previous task to finish. The close does not accelerate because your team works harder — it accelerates because preparation volume is no longer capped by available hours.
When your CFO signs off on the financial statements, how confident are you that every manual close step is fully documented, consistently applied, and defensible to an external auditor?
Every AI proposal includes an explanation of how the recommendation was created and highlights any items that require attention. The finance team reviews and approves proposals before anything is posted.
All actions continue to run through SAP S/4HANA using the same controls, workflows, and audit trails already familiar to auditors. This provides greater transparency and traceability while keeping people fully in control of financial decisions.
How does your team currently handle intercompany reconciliation — and how much time is spent identifying, explaining, and resolving mismatches across entity pairs before the books can close?
The Intercompany Reconciliation agent automatically compares receivables and payables across all entity pairs, flags items requiring attention, and provides detailed reasoning for each matched pair. Your accountants review and approve rather than build the comparison from scratch — shifting their role from executing the close to overseeing it.