How Halden closes the month in two days
The finance team at Halden used to spend nine days on month-end. Here is the process they handed to an agent, and the parts they kept for people.
Maya Reyes1 min read
At the end of every month, the finance team at Halden used to stop everything else. Nine working days of matching invoices to purchase orders, chasing missing receipts and explaining small differences to auditors. Nobody enjoyed it, and nobody thought it could be faster.
What changed
The team did not try to automate the whole close at once. They started with the most repetitive step: matching supplier invoices to purchase orders. An Orvyn agent now reads every invoice that arrives in the shared inbox, finds the matching order and checks quantities, prices and tax.
When everything lines up, the invoice goes straight into the payment batch. When something is off, the agent writes a short note explaining what it found and sends it to the right person.
"The agent does the matching, my team reviews the exceptions, and nobody works late on the last Friday anymore."
The rules they wrote
The agent follows three rules the team wrote in plain words:
- Invoices under $5,000 that match an order exactly are approved automatically.
- Any price difference above 2% goes to the person who placed the order.
- Invoices from a new supplier always wait for a finance lead.
These rules took one afternoon to write and one week of side-by-side runs to trust.
What the team does now
The matching that took four days now takes about forty minutes of review. The time they got back goes into the work people are good at: talking to suppliers, planning cash flow and answering questions from the leadership team.
Month-end at Halden now takes two days. The team expects to get it under one by the end of the year.
