Use cases · Finance
Finance work with an AI worker on the roster
The chasing, sorting and assembling that fills a finance week, prepared by a worker you brief once and review every time.
What the worker does
Polaris gives a finance team an AI worker that prepares the repetitive half of finance work: chasing unpaid invoices, sorting receipts into categories, assembling the month-end checklist, drafting budget variance notes and tracking vendor renewals. The worker reads Stripe, Gmail and Google Drive through connections authorized once for the org, and posts each result as a comment on the task. A qualified human reviews the numbers and signs off.
- Connections used
- Stripe · Gmail · Google Drive
- Software cost
- $0
- Work cost
- ~$2 per human-hour delivered
- Who closes the task
- You, never the machine
Finance work is mostly retrieval, and retrieval is what a worker is good at
Look at where a finance week actually goes. Someone opens Stripe, opens a mailbox, opens a folder of PDFs, and moves facts between them until a number agrees with another number. Then someone qualified decides what the number means.
An AI worker in Polaris does the first part. It has the same task, the same comment thread and the same due date as a human teammate, because humans and AI workers are the same kind of record in Polaris. It reads the connections you gave it, works through a checklist you wrote, and posts the result back as a comment with the files attached.
It does not sign anything. It does not close its own task. The delivery arrives as a comment and stays open until a person reads it and closes it.
The five finance jobs covered here
Each one has its own page with the brief, the connections and the review step written out.
Invoice tracking
An aged list of who owes what, matched against Stripe, with a reminder email drafted per account and none of them sent.
Expense categorization
Receipts pulled out of Gmail, coded against your own chart of accounts, with anything ambiguous escalated instead of guessed.
Month-end close
The close checklist assembled and chased across the people who owe items, so week two stops being a surprise.
Budget reporting
Plan against actuals, with the variances that exceed your threshold written up in prose a non-finance reader can follow.
Vendor management
Every contract's renewal date, notice window and current spend in one list, with the notice deadlines dated in the Focus lane.
What each job needs and what comes back
| Job | Connections | Delivered as |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice tracking | Stripe, Gmail | Aged receivables list + drafted reminder per account |
| Expense categorization | Gmail, Google Drive | Coded transaction file + an escalation list |
| Month-end close | Google Drive, Slack, Docs | Live checklist with owners, plus a daily status comment |
| Budget reporting | Google Drive, Stripe | Variance memo as a PDF, with the working shown |
| Vendor management | Gmail, Google Calendar, Stripe | Vendor register + dated notice deadlines |
The division of labor, written down
This is not a hedge. It is how the product works: agents deliver, humans close.
The worker prepares
- Pulling records out of Stripe, Gmail and Drive
- Matching payments to invoices and flagging what does not match
- Applying your written coding rules to transactions
- Chasing checklist owners and reporting who has not responded
- Drafting the memo, the reminder, the summary
- Ticking its own acceptance criteria as it goes
A qualified person decides
- Whether a treatment is correct
- Anything with a tax consequence
- Which late accounts get chased and how hard
- Whether the books are ready to close
- What the variance means and what to do about it
- Closing the task and rating the work
What this costs
The software is free. You pay for work that was delivered.
$0
Polaris software, forever
Unlimited people, tasks, workstreams and docs
~$2
Per human-hour delivered
Itemized job by job on the worker's work log
0
Charge for a job that delivered nothing
Nothing delivered, nothing billed
Finance use cases in detail
Invoice tracking that produces a chase list, not a dashboard
A worker matches Stripe payments to what you invoiced, ages the gap, and drafts the reminder for each account. You decide who actually gets chased.
Expense categorization that escalates instead of guessing
A worker pulls receipts out of the mailbox, codes them against your own chart of accounts, and puts anything ambiguous in a pile for you rather than picking a category to look finished.
A monthly close that stops drifting into week two
The close is a chase, not a calculation. A worker runs the chase: who owes what item, who has gone quiet, and what is blocking the two things that always block.
Budget reports written for the people who did the spending
Plan against actuals is easy to produce and hard to read. A worker writes the variance up in sentences a department head will actually act on.
Vendor management that catches the notice window
Most money lost on vendors is lost by missing a cancellation deadline nobody had written down. A worker keeps the register and dates the deadlines.
Questions people ask
+Can an AI worker in Polaris close the books?
No. A worker can assemble the close checklist, chase the people who owe items and report what is still outstanding. Declaring a period closed is a judgment with accountability attached, and it stays with the person who holds that accountability.
+Does the worker get access to our bank account?
Only if a bank is in the connection catalog, and it is not. The catalog is fixed: Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Figma, HubSpot, Stripe, Supabase, WhatsApp, Instagram and web search. A finance worker typically gets Stripe, Gmail and Google Drive, and nothing else.
+How do we know the hours on the bill are real?
Every job writes a work log entry with the observable effort behind it: how many searches it ran, how much finished prose it produced, how many checklist items and files. Hours are computed from that with a published formula and clamped between five minutes and eight hours. Any line can be challenged from the log itself.
+Can two people review the same delivery?
Yes. A delivery is a comment on a task, so it sits in the thread where anyone with access can read it, reply and attach their own notes. The task stays open until a human closes it.
+What happens if the worker gets a number wrong?
You see it before it matters, because the delivery is a draft in a comment rather than an action taken in your ledger. Reopen the thread, say what was wrong, and the correction becomes the next task. Persistent corrections belong in the worker's SKILL.md so the rule sticks.
Related
Invoice tracking that produces a chase list, not a dashboard
A worker matches Stripe payments to what you invoiced, ages the gap, and drafts the reminder for each account. You decide who actually gets chased.
A monthly close that stops drifting into week two
The close is a chase, not a calculation. A worker runs the chase: who owes what item, who has gone quiet, and what is blocking the two things that always block.
Hire an AI bookkeeper
It does the sorting, chasing and drafting that eats a finance afternoon, and it stops at the line where a qualified person has to sign.
Hire an AI financial analyst
You supply the figures; it writes the explanation of what moved, why it matters and which assumption the whole thing rests on.
Connect Stripe to Polaris
This is the one connection where the key you choose matters more than anything on this page.
What an AI worker costs, and how the hours are counted
The whole formula is on this page, including the parts that make it an estimate rather than a measurement.
Delivery comment
Work arrives where the task already lives, attributed and reviewable, and the task stays open.
Board packs where the assembly is not your weekend
A board pack is 80% data you already have and 20% the story only you can tell. The 80% is what eats the week.