Finance and accounting

Every expense lands in the account and cost center a controller would choose.

A customer's payment for a sale has cleared into the business's own account, with the amount, the fees, and any failure, refund or dispute recorded against that sale, and without a person handling the money.

Every invoice or charge past its due date has been chased on a schedule somebody decided, and has ended as paid, disputed in writing, in a payment arrangement, or written off on a recorded decision, with the customer relationship still intact where that was possible.

Every sale carries the tax the buyer's jurisdiction requires, at the rate and treatment in force on the day of the sale, for that product category and that customer's status, with the rule and the rate that produced the amount recorded against the transaction.

Each material variance in the monthly pack carries a draft explanation grounded in the underlying transactions.

Every jurisdiction the business is registered in receives a return for each period and the money owed with it, on or before its own deadline, prepared from the transaction record, with the filing confirmation and the payment kept against that period.

Duplicates, unusual amounts, odd counterparties and policy breaches are flagged before money moves.

A rolling cash forecast that a treasurer trusts for the next 13 weeks, updated as receivables and payables move.

Every amount a customer owes has been invoiced soon after it was earned, to the right entity, with the terms, tax treatment and references the customer needs in order to pay it without asking a question.

An incoming invoice is matched to its order and receipt lines, with exceptions surfaced, without manual keying.

Each approved supplier bill has left the business's account on or before its due date, to the bank details the supplier actually gave, in the right currency, exactly once, recorded against the bill it settles.

Bank lines and ledger entries are matched and every unmatched item is explained or queued, by the close date.

Every employee is paid the correct net amount on the published pay date, with income tax, social contributions and other statutory and elective deductions withheld at the rate their circumstances require, each one remitted to the authority or provider that is owed it by that body's own deadline, and a pay statement the employee can read showing how gross became net.

A third party is the seller on the record for each sale: it contracts with the buyer, charges and remits the transaction tax under its own registrations, carries the refund and chargeback liability, and pays the business its balance on a stated schedule, with the sales, the tax and the payout recorded for every period.

Money owed to many individual recipients, who are not suppliers sending bills, reaches each of them on the schedule they were promised, to a destination that was verified, in a currency they can use, with the fees, the exchange rate and the reason for any hold visible to the recipient.

When a valuation, a trade, a report or an agent's decision needs the price, volume or market history of an asset, the figure is available at the freshness the use requires, from a source that can be named and re-queried, with the venue, the time and the currency it was quoted in.