AI Agents for Finance Operations Glossary: Key Terms & Concepts

The overall accounts payable (AP) balance of a corporation at a given moment in time will appear in the current liabilities column of its balance sheet. Accounts payable are debts that mus...read more

The term "accounts receivable" refers to a company's unpaid bills or the money owed to it by customers. Accounts that a company is entitled to receive as a result of delivering a product o...read more

The approval workflow is a standard corporate procedure in which data must be signed off at a given point. Approval procedures necessitate various checks from a range of stakeholders throu...read more

Exception handling is a vital feature in software development that enables programs to effectively handle unexpected or exceptional situations that may arise during execution. These situat...read more

The accounting system exchanges data with an enterprise resource planning platform, so records such as purchase orders, inventory movements, payroll and sales flow between the two without ...read more

A control used in accounts payable that compares three documents before a supplier invoice is approved for payment: the purchase order, the goods receipt confirming what arrived, and the i...read more

Matching incoming customer payments to the open invoices they are meant to settle, so accounts receivable reflects what has actually been paid. It becomes difficult when a single payment c...read more

Reconciliation is the check that a balance recorded in the general ledger agrees with the supporting evidence behind it, such as a bank statement, a subledger, or a schedule of open items....read more

Close management coordinates the many tasks that have to happen before a period's books can be finalised — reconciliations, journal entries, intercompany matching, reviews, and sign-offs. ...read more

Groups made up of several legal entities routinely trade with themselves, moving stock, services, loans or shared costs between subsidiaries. Intercompany accounting records both sides of ...read more

Software support for the recurring routine of closing the books for a period: posting accruals and adjusting entries, reconciling accounts, ticking off checklist items, and locking the per...read more

Dunning automation is the chasing of unpaid invoices: the reminder schedule, the wording that goes out, who is copied as an invoice ages, and when a person picks up the phone instead. Wha...read more

Credit management is deciding how much credit a customer gets and on what terms, then watching that limit as the relationship runs. In this category the work is usually a scored recommend...read more

Journal entry automation means the software drafts the entry itself: it picks the accounts, the amounts and the period, attaches the documents it worked from, and presents the result for a...read more

Flux analysis compares this period against the last one and explains each movement, naming the transactions behind a swing rather than only reporting that the balance changed. It is the q...read more