XLCFO OS
Nine narrow specialists beat one general assistant.
A model asked to do one job against an explicit written policy is auditable in a way a general assistant never is. Each agent below has a narrow remit, its own rule set, its own escalation threshold — and a list of things it will not do under any instruction.
The design principle
Separate the interpretation from the arithmetic.
The agents interpret: they read a contract, recognise a supplier, work out what a transaction is, draft the commentary, explain a variance in words a director will act on. That is what models are genuinely good at.
The rules are explicit and written down: materiality thresholds, the approval matrix, covenant definitions transcribed verbatim from the facility document, the escalation matrix. The agent does not invent a threshold and cannot quietly move one.
And every material judgement stops at a gate for a person. The agents do the work; a named Chartered Accountant owns the opinion.
The specialists
Eight narrow jobs, done the same way every cycle.
Ledger
Ingests bank feeds, invoices and receipts. Codes every transaction against the chart of accounts and tracking categories, applies GST treatment transaction by transaction rather than by blanket supplier rule, matches payments to invoices, and reconciles daily rather than at period end. Where a transaction does not match a known pattern with high confidence it is queued for a human instead of guessed.
Escalates: unmatched items over the materiality threshold, new suppliers with no coding history, anything that would change a prior-period balance, and any payee whose bank account has changed since the last run — that last one at any value, every time.
Will never: initiate a payment, alter a locked period, or record a source document it has not seen.
Xero · QuickBooks · MYOB · Hubdoc · Dext · ApprovalMaxCompliance
Owns the obligations calendar across every entity: GST, PAYE, FBT, RWT and NRWT, provisional and terminal income tax in New Zealand; BAS, PAYG and superannuation in Australia. Prepares each return from the ledger and then reconciles the return back to the accounts — output tax to revenue, the control account to the return, the balance sheet movement to prior filings and payments. A difference it cannot explain is an exception, not a tolerance.
Escalates: any position that is arguable rather than settled, any late filing risk at the moment it appears, any new jurisdiction trigger, and any reconciliation that does not tie.
Will never: file a return, authorise a tax payment, log in to a revenue authority portal, or state a due date it has not verified against a current source.
Inland Revenue · ATO · multi-jurisdiction registersClose
Runs the period-end checklist without being reminded: cut-off, accruals and prepayments, payroll and leave, depreciation and the fixed asset roll-forward, IFRS 16 leases, the debt schedule, intercompany matching, FX revaluation and translation, consolidation elimination. Because reconciliation happens daily, most of the close is already done when the period ends — what remains is judgement and sign-off. Status is visible while it runs, not reported afterwards.
Escalates: any unsubstantiated balance sheet account at the target close day, every judgemental provision or estimate, revenue recognition changes, unmatched intercompany balances, and any entry that reopens a prior period.
Will never: sign the close, post an entry to force a reconciliation to balance, or close over an unmatched intercompany balance.
Substantiation pack · Judgements register · Manual journal listingReporting
Builds the management pack, the board pack, the investor update and lender covenant reporting. Not a template dump — variance commentary that answers what changed and why, what the consequence is, what decision is being asked of the board, and what is not yet known. Covenants are reproduced exactly as the facility document words them, never paraphrased, with headroom in dollars and percentage and the trend across the last four tests.
Escalates: every pack, without exception, before it is circulated. Also any figure it could not tie to the closed ledger, any restatement of a previously reported number, and any request to present a figure in a way it considers misleading.
Will never: circulate anything itself, present a forecast as an actual, or invent a comparative when the real one is unavailable.
Management · Board · Investor · Lender covenantForecast
Maintains a rolling 13-week direct cash forecast built from the open ledgers, a rolling 12-month view for the board and the bank, and a driver-based three-statement model underneath both. Every re-forecast begins by scoring the version it replaces — forecast against actual, the three largest misses, and whether each was timing or quantum. Timing misses are a forecasting problem; quantum misses are usually a business problem, and it says which.
Escalates: runway below the board-agreed floor under any case, covenant headroom compression, a material forecast miss, any new or accelerated funding requirement, and any assumption it was instructed to use that it considers unsupportable.
Will never: build a forecast line that does not trace to a driver or a schedule, quietly change an assumption between versions, or produce a downside case the client would find comfortable.
13-week direct · Rolling 12-month · Scenario & sensitivityTreasury
Owns the cash that exists today: position by account, entity and currency, available against committed, and cash trapped in entities that cannot lend it upward without a consequence — the last of which is routinely missed and materially overstates group liquidity. Also facilities and headroom, covenant calculation, working capital and debtor concentration, FX exposure, and payment-run preparation with the exceptions listed first.
Escalates: covenant headroom below the alert threshold or any projected breach, a facility expiring inside the forecast horizon, available cash below the board floor, any payee bank account change, and any payment exceeding the approver's delegated authority.
Will never: move money. No payment, transfer, drawdown, FX deal or release, under any instruction. It also never adopts the favourable reading of an ambiguous covenant definition.
Position · Facilities · Covenants · Payment run prepCapital
Keeps the company permanently raise-ready and sale-ready. Maintains the data room index and its completeness percentage by folder, the cap table reconciled to the share register, and a six-domain investor-readiness diagnostic scored against what diligence actually asks for. Drafts diligence responses from source documents it can cite — where no source exists the answer is "no source located" and it becomes a gap, not a paragraph of plausible prose.
Escalates: valuation in any form, dilution and option pool decisions, every term sheet mechanic, investor selection, anything leaving the company, and any material fact that contradicts a prior investor communication.
Will never: contact an investor, state or endorse a valuation, or omit a red flag because the raise is close.
Data room · Cap table · Diligence Q&A · Readiness scorecardGovernance
Runs the board calendar backwards from each meeting date so the first at-risk link is flagged rather than the last. Maintains the risk register as a live document, tracks every resolution and action to completion with its ageing, keeps statutory records current against the public register, and tests the delegated authority matrix against actual approvals — because a matrix never tested against transactions is a document, not a control.
Escalates: overdue statutory obligations, internal records inconsistent with the public register, board actions open beyond two meeting cycles, undeclared conflicts, delegated authority breaches, and residual risks above the board's stated appetite.
Will never: file with a registry, or write minutes as a record of a meeting it was not at. Agendas and templates only.
Board calendar · Risk register · Statutory recordsAgent 09
The Controller.
The supervisor. It does not do the finance work — it decides who does, checks what comes back, and decides what a person must see.
It holds the materiality thresholds and the approval matrix, routes work to the specialists in the right sequence, and then runs the review gate on everything they produce: completeness, traceability to a named source, policy compliance, and a reasonableness test that asks whether the movement makes sense for the business as it understands it.
Its most important job is the one no single agent can do — cross-checking the specialists against each other. Cash per Treasury must equal opening cash per Forecast must equal the reconciled bank per Ledger. Revenue in the pack must equal revenue in the closed ledger must equal the revenue underpinning the GST return. There are ten such tests. Where two agents disagree, the deliverable does not go out and the disagreement is reported as the finding — no averaging, no picking the one that ran last.
It has the authority to send work back to a specialist, and it uses it. It does not patch an output itself, because a supervisor-edited deliverable has no clean provenance and breaks the audit trail.
Autonomy is earned
Every engagement starts at tier one, where nothing acts and everything is proposed. Tier two allows routine coding and reconciliation on high confidence. Tier three runs the full cycle. Each is earned over completed cycles and lost immediately on a material error reaching the client.
There is no tier four
No amount of demonstrated accuracy allows an agent to file a return, release a payment, sign a pack or send anything externally. The absolute escalation list never empties. That is a design decision, not a current limitation.
Uncertainty escalates
Anything the Controller is uncertain about goes to a human. Not as a formality — uncertainty is an explicit trigger in the escalation matrix, ranked alongside covenant breaches and suspected fraud.
The boundary
Six things no agent does, at any tier.
Not configuration. Not a setting an administrator can change. Built into every agent's instructions and enforced at the supervising layer.
Never files
No return to Inland Revenue, the ATO, the Companies Office or any registry. A prepared return goes to a person who files it.
Never moves money
No payment, transfer, drawdown, FX deal or release. Payment runs are prepared with exceptions first, then handed over.
Never sends externally
No email, no portal upload, no post. Deliverables are handed to a person, who decides what goes out and when.
Never signs
The reviewer line on every deliverable stays blank until a named Chartered Accountant completes it.
Never advises
No legal, tax or investment advice. Analysis and preparation, with the position named and referred to a qualified adviser.
Never invents
No figure, source document, comparative or client detail that does not exist. A gap is reported as a gap.
See them run on your own numbers.
Give us read-only access to a single month and we will show you what the agents find, what they escalate, and what your current process missed.