The method
Document before you automate.
Most automation fails because it was built against a guess about how the work happens. The method removes the guess. Nothing is coded until the process exists on paper and the person who does it today has agreed the paper is right.
Capture
The person who does the job records themselves doing it. A screen recording and a transcript, nothing more. It takes an hour and it is the most valuable hour in the engagement.
Record
The recording becomes a frame index: a still of the screen at every moment someone spoke. From that, a process document to a fixed standard. Actors and systems, inputs, steps with the screen they happen on, variants, outputs, rules with their sources, timing, the owner’s own words about what hurts. Open questions stay open until a person answers them. Nothing is guessed.
Confirm
A plain-English runbook goes back to the process owner. This is what happens now, this is what changes for you, this is what we still need. Their sign-off is the gate. No build starts without it.
Automate
A skill is written against the document. Script-first, dry-run by default, idempotent, every write audit-logged. Every rule in the code cites the section of the process document it came from. A skill that contradicts its document is a bug.
Run
The agent does the work on schedule. The owner reviews what it produced. Exceptions notify. The process document, the runbook, and the skill live side by side, and a change to how the job is done updates the document first.
What you get out of it.
A process library. Every recurring process in the finance function, written to the same standard, filed beside the code that runs it. Auditors like it. New hires like it more.
A function that survives people. When the person who knew how it worked leaves, the document stays and the agent keeps running.
Honest scope. The capture tells you what the work really is before anyone prices the automation. Surprises happen on paper, in week one, not in month four.
Res, non verba.
Deeds, not words. Which is why the record comes first.