Some piles should not get an agent this quarter. Saying that on a free call is cheaper than discovering it after go-live. If any of the four below is true of your queue, stop. Do not book us to paper over it.
Nobody can state the rule
The agent cannot execute a decision the business cannot say out loud. “We know it when we see it” is a person. It is a reasonable way to work a small pile. It is not a specification.
If two reviewers would route the same invoice or form differently, and they cannot explain why, you need a process decision first. We will not pretend a model will settle an argument your team has been having for years.
The format will not sit still
Handwriting, photos of printouts, a new supplier layout every week, scans that are really photographs of a screen: extraction will be a toy. Native capture tools have got better at clean PDFs. They have not made a messy intake process into a clean one.
Unstable formats are not a prompt problem. They are an upstream problem: ask the supplier for a structured file, or keep a person on that slice, or both. Automating the slice that is already a clean PDF, and leaving the rest, is allowed. Automating the whole pile because twenty invoices looked easy in a demo is how review queues get worse.
The system of record is about to move
If the ERP, the AP tool, or the shared inbox is being replaced in the next few months, wire the agent after the migration. You will otherwise pay for the go-live twice, and the permission set you fought for will belong to a tenant you are decommissioning.
“We will migrate in the autumn” is enough reason to wait. A date that moves every quarter is also enough reason to wait, until someone will put a month on a page.
The volume does not pay for a monthly run
$2,900 a month is priced against a coordinator’s loaded cost on a real queue. A pile that one person clears on Friday afternoon does not need an agent. Macros, a better folder, and a naming convention will get you further, and they do not need us.
We would rather say that than invoice for it.
What ready looks like
A join key the document actually carries (a purchase order number, a policy number, an account id). A system you can get a service account for. A rule a process owner can state in a meeting. A sample of the live tail, including the items you are embarrassed by. An owner for the items that will not match.
That is the document processing workflow. Extract, check against the systems you already run, send anything uncertain to a person with the source attached. Anything that creates a legal, claims, or payment fact stays with your team until you approve those writes.
If your pile is not ready, do not book an implementation to be polite. Fix the rule, wait for the migration, or keep a person on it. If you think it might be ready and want an argument, the assessment is free. Bring the pile. We will tell you if an agent is the wrong next step.