A finance function that prepares everything and approves nothing.
Akontec allocates a live international finance back-office to your company — payables, receivables, reconciliation, expenses, master data and month-end close. A virtual desk does the preparation. Every approval, every posting and every payment stays with a named human being, because that is what a control environment means.
Position at standard band
Per month · ₹95/USDEvery running cost deducted. Volume-linked, not assured.
The objection here is not accuracy. It is authority.
Nobody buying an eCommerce desk asks what happens if the AI goes wrong at the level of a criminal offence. In finance they do, and they are right to.
The fear is specific and it is well founded: an automated system that can move money, change a vendor's bank details, or post to a general ledger is an internal-control failure waiting to be written up. Every finance director your prospect reports to has read about invoice fraud and vendor-detail interception, and most have seen one attempted.
So this desk is built the other way round. The agents prepare. They capture, code, match, reconcile, schedule and analyse. They do not approve, post, pay or amend a bank detail — not because they are configured not to, but because they are bound to no tool that could. There is no permission setting that grants it and no screen that exposes it.
That constraint is the product. A finance client is not buying speed at the cost of control; they are buying the preparation labour and keeping the control entirely.
Six cycles, running continuously.
Ordinary finance back-office for mid-market companies. Measurable output, a service standard, and an audit trail on every line.
Accounts payable
Invoice capture and coding, purchase-order and goods-receipt matching, duplicate and anomaly detection, query resolution with vendors, and a payment run prepared for human approval.
Accounts receivable
Customer invoicing, cash application against remittances, aged debt analysis, dunning and collections follow-up, dispute logging and credit-note preparation.
Reconciliation
Bank, control account and intercompany matching; unmatched item investigation; break analysis with a proposed treatment attached to each one.
Expenses & cards
Claim review against the client's own policy, receipt and VAT validation, card statement matching, policy-breach flagging and reimbursement schedules.
Month-end close
Accrual and prepayment schedules, fixed asset and depreciation runs, balance sheet reconciliations, variance analysis and the management pack.
Master data
Vendor and customer record maintenance, onboarding documentation, tax and KYC evidence collection, and duplicate-record cleansing.
Full scope, exclusions, volume bands and the service standard are in the engagement. The close cycle has its own page: month-end.
What this function costs on seats.
Price it as you would any international F&A campaign. Standard-band volume on a conventional staffing model needs around eighteen productive people once review layers and close-period cover are real.
| Line | Conventional seat model | AI Finance |
|---|---|---|
| Productive headcount | 16–20 processors and analysts | 1 reviewer |
| Review layer | 2 seniors, 1 team lead, 1 QA | Your existing reviewer |
| Close-period surge | Overtime, or a slipped close | Absorbed — no rota |
| Ramp to full production | 60–90 days, F&A hiring is slow | 22 days |
| Domain knowledge | Held by staff, lost at attrition, retrained each cycle | Held in an index, retained permanently |
| Consistency of coding | Varies by processor and by month | Same rules applied every time, sampled weekly |
| Audit trail | Reconstructed on request | Append-only, 24 months |
| Capital at risk to start | Seats, systems, hiring, ramp salaries | ₹3,25,000 one-time |
One thing this table understates: on a seat model, close week is when your margin disappears. Overtime, weekend cover and a senior reviewing until midnight. A virtual desk does not charge more in the last five days of the month.
What no agent on this desk can do.
Enforced in the action handler and in the tool bindings, not written as an instruction. There is no configuration that grants any of these, and no screen in the ledger that exposes them.
- Never initiate, approve or release a payment of any kind
- Never create or amend a vendor or customer bank detail — the single most attacked field in finance, always human, always dual-verified
- Never post a journal to the general ledger without a named human approval
- Never approve an expense claim, a credit note or a write-off
- Never sign off a reconciliation — it prepares, a person attests
- Never communicate with a bank, an auditor or a tax authority
- Never alter, delete or backdate an entry in the audit trail
- Never act as both preparer and reviewer on the same item
What you keep, not what you bill.
The desk bills in USD against a published unit card. Every running cost you carry is on the page and already deducted from the income figure.
Standard band — monthly
Crew of 10Converted at ₹95/USD = ₹1,63,900. Volumes are planning bases.
What reaches your account
After all running costSetup recovered in month 4. Roughly ₹10,04,000 across year one.
- You run a registered BPO or ITES company with GST and can sign a service agreement
- You have one reviewer with genuine finance literacy — this is the one role that cannot be a generalist
- You want an international, USD-linked F&A line without an F&A hiring cycle
- You are comfortable with volume-linked revenue rather than a fixed per-seat invoice
- You can carry two months of running cost while allocation ramps
- You want passive income with nobody attesting the work
- Your reviewer cannot read a reconciliation or challenge a coding decision
- You expect to bring your own finance clients — allocation comes from Akontec
- You want the desk to approve or post anything autonomously
- You need the setup back inside two months
A walkthrough shows the control boundary better than any page.
Thirty minutes with an Akontec delivery manager: the desk preparing a payment run, the review queue, and an agent refusing to touch a bank detail change.