What finance teams have said about working with Suria

Challenge

Monthly close taking eight working days

A 35-person manufacturing company in Selangor found their month-end close extending to eight working days, with AP reconciliation accounting for roughly half the time. The finance team of six had no documentation of the close steps beyond informal notes.

Solution

Close Process Review followed by Invoice Triage Setup

The Close Process Review identified AP invoice coding as the primary candidate for AI assistance. A full Invoice Triage Setup followed over nine weeks, with the model trained on 14 months of posted entries in their AutoCount environment. The exception-handling playbook was written before go-live.

Result

Close reduced to five and a half days

Three months after Invoice Triage go-live, the close had reduced to five and a half working days. The AP suggestion acceptance rate stabilised at 81%. No audit queries on AI-assisted entries at year-end.

Duration: 12 weeks total

Challenge

Audit committee asked about AI governance

A regional subsidiary of a Singapore-listed company had begun using AI coding suggestions after an internal IT initiative. Their audit committee asked the CFO to produce a formal governance memo. The team had no documentation of how the AI was supervised or how errors were handled.

Solution

Quarterly Stewardship from Q1 2025

Suria reviewed the existing AI workflow, documented the approval chain, and produced the first quarterly audit committee memo within three weeks of engagement start. The memo addressed the committee's specific questions about acceptance rates, data lineage, and MFRS treatment of AI-suggested entries.

Result

Committee query resolved; governance documented

The audit committee accepted the memo without further questions. The Stewardship engagement continues through FY25. The client's external auditors were provided a copy of the Q1 memo during their interim visit and raised no follow-up queries.

Ongoing engagement since January 2025

Challenge

Unclear where AI would actually help

A professional services firm in Kuala Lumpur had heard about AI for finance from several software vendors and was uncertain which claims were credible. Their CFO wanted an independent assessment before committing to any deployment.

Solution

Close Process Review only

The Close Process Review found that the company's invoice volume was below the threshold where AI triage provides meaningful time savings. The brief recommended against an Invoice Triage deployment and instead suggested two process changes — vendor coding consistency and a single AP reviewer assigned per cycle — as more effective first steps.

Result

No deployment — and the client preferred it that way

The client implemented both process changes within six weeks without any AI deployment. The CFO's comment: "The most useful thing was being told clearly that AI was not the right tool here. The brief was worth the fee for that alone."

Duration: 2 weeks · RM 1,300