Technology Rewired: Finance and Accounting

How has the finance and accounting team changed across five eras?

1. Era 1 · On-prem

   Before 2005

   0.3

   Finance ran on paper, desktop accounting, and on-prem ERP. AP clerks keyed invoices, AR clerks mailed statements and made collection calls, and the month-end close was a week of reconciliations in spreadsheets. Headcount grew with transaction volume.

2. Era 2 · SaaS and cloud

   2005 to 2020

   1.0

   Cloud accounting, bill pay, expense tools, and corporate cards moved the work to the browser and cut paper out. Teams added systems owners and FP&A analysts, but the close still ran monthly and exceptions still went through email. Seat-based pricing met a function that often has few seats, a mismatch I return to in the hard truths about SaaS in 2026.

3. Era 3 · AI-assisted

   2020 to 2024

   1.8

   OCR and ML captured invoice data, suggested GL codes, and flagged duplicate or unusual payments. Clerks reviewed what the model extracted rather than typing it.

4. Era 4 · Agentic

   2024 onward

   2.5

   AP agents now read invoices, match them to purchase orders and receipts, route approvals, and chase missing information, and similar agents categorize expenses and draft reconciliations. The team is shifting from data entry to exception handling and controls. Payments themselves are changing as agents start to transact, which I cover in agentic commerce.

5. Era 5 · Next 5 years

   2026 to 2031

   3.8

   My bet: the close becomes continuous, with agents reconciling daily and humans reviewing exceptions, and AP and AR run with a fraction of today's manual touches. Controllers own the controls agents run under. Segregation of duties gets harder and more important when the same agent can create and approve.

Which finance and accounting software is being rewired?

• Invoicing and Accounts Payable

  Accounts payable has moved from clerks keying paper invoices into QuickBooks and SAP, through cloud AP tools like Bill.com and Coupa, to AI agents that read, code, match, route and pay invoices. Since late 2025 Ramp, BILL, Tipalti and Basware ship AP agents. Humans still approve payments and own vendor bank changes.

Coming next

• Payments and checkoutwave 2
• Expense managementwave 3
• Accounts receivable and collections
• Billing and subscriptions
• Corporate cards
• Accounting and general ledger
• FP&A and budgeting
• Tax compliance
• Payroll
• Treasury