The Future of Cash Management: From Automation of Intelligence to Automation of Execution

Picture this: It's 10 PM on a Tuesday, and a CFO is frantically updating spreadsheets to answer their board's question about runway. The data exists—scattered across their bank, accounting system, and various CSV exports—but assembling it takes hours. Meanwhile, a critical vendor payment sits in limbo because no one's sure if it matches the approved PO from three months ago.

This is cash management today. And it shouldn't be.

We often hear that finance teams spend the majority of their time on data gathering and reconciliation—not on the strategic decisions that actually move their business forward. They're armed with powerful tools for analysis, yet they're constantly playing catch-up with their own data.

At Arc, we believe the next decade will look radically different. AI will transform how companies understand and operate their finances—not in one leap, but through two distinct phases that build on each other.

Phase 1: Automation of Intelligence

The first transformation is already beginning: automating financial intelligence itself.

Today's finance teams are stuck in a question-answer loop, manually investigating the same types of queries over and over:

• How much did we spend last month on SaaS subscriptions across all teams?
• What's our real runway given current burn and the three new hires starting next month?
• How concentrated is our customer revenue, and which accounts create the most risk?

These aren't hard questions conceptually. But answering them requires pulling data from multiple systems, reconciling inconsistencies, and applying context that lives only in people's heads.

What Makes AI-Powered Intelligence Different

This isn't just faster reporting. AI fundamentally changes what's possible by continuously learning your business context and connecting dots across systems in real time.

Systems like Arc's CFO Agent (Archie) combine your accounting data, bank activity, and company-specific context to create what we call "continuous intelligence"—insights that update automatically, explain themselves in plain language, and proactively surface what matters.

Before: A founder asks "What's driving our higher burn this month?" The finance lead spends 90 minutes pulling reports, building pivot tables, and writing an explanation.

After: The AI agent instantly responds: "Your burn increased $47K this month, driven primarily by three factors: new engineering hires ($28K), a one-time legal expense ($12K), and higher AWS costs as usage scaled 35% ($7K). Your runway decreased from 18 to 16.5 months, but remains healthy given current growth metrics."

The agent didn't just calculate—it contextualized, explained, and assessed.

Intelligence That Acts Like a Teammate

What excites us most is how this shifts from interrogation to collaboration. Instead of finance teams asking questions, the system anticipates what matters:

• Detecting that marketing spend jumped 40% month-over-month and flagging it before the month closes
• Noticing that runway projections shifted after headcount changes and updating forecasts automatically
• Identifying that $500K in operating cash hasn't moved in 60 days and could be more effectively utilized
• Spotting that three major customer contracts renew next quarter and should be prioritized in revenue planning

This is the goal of Phase 1: finance teams should spend their time making decisions, not hunting for the data that enables those decisions.

Phase 2: Automation of Execution

Once intelligence is automated and surfaced continuously, the natural frontier becomes automating execution itself.

This phase is more ambitious but it's where the real leverage multiplies. Here, AI agents don't just analyze and recommend—they act.

They'll handle workflows that are repetitive, rule-based, and auditable—the operational backbone of finance that consumes enormous time but requires minimal judgment once workflows are set.

What Automated Execution Looks Like

An Accounts Payable Agent that receives invoices via email, extracts key details, matches them against purchase orders, checks approval policies, routes to the right stakeholders, and schedules payments—all while maintaining a complete audit trail. The finance team sets policies and exceptions. The agent handles the execution and involves the team only when important.

An Accounts Receivable Agent that generates invoices based on contract terms, sends them at optimal times, tracks payment status, sends appropriate follow-ups (friendly for day 15, firmer for day 45), escalates concerning patterns, and automatically reconciles incoming payments. Your team manages relationships and negotiations. The agent manages the process.

A Bookkeeping Agent that categorizes every transaction, identifies patterns to improve future classifications, flags anomalies, reaches out to team members for missing receipts, and keeps your general ledger current within hours—not weeks. Your controller focuses on month-end close strategy. The agent handles the daily mechanics.

The Control Question

We know what you're thinking: "What if it pays the wrong vendor?" or "What if it miscategorizes something important?"

This is the right concern, and it's why Phase 2 requires different guardrails than Phase 1. Automated execution works through:

• Clear boundaries: Agents operate within defined limits (e.g., "auto-approve payments under $5K that match approved POs")
• Confidence thresholds: When certainty is low, agents request human review rather than guessing
• Complete audit trails: Every action is logged with reasoning, making it easy to review and refine
• Progressive autonomy: Teams start with narrow automation and expand as trust builds

The goal isn't to remove humans from finance—it's to remove humans from repetitive execution so they can focus on judgment, strategy, and relationship building.

Think of it this way: the agent handles paying what you should on time and collecting what you're owed, while your team handles the decisions that shape those workflows and the exceptions that require human review.

Why This Transformation Matters

Finance has historically lagged other functions in automation and leverage. While product teams deploy continuously and marketing runs sophisticated multi-channel campaigns, finance teams often still rely on monthly closes, manual reconciliation, and fragmented tools.

That gap has real costs. Late insights mean late decisions. Manual workflows mean errors and delays. Limited leverage means finance headcount grows linearly with company scale.

As AI reshapes cash management, those constraints dissolve.

The Compounding Effects

When finance moves from reactive to proactive, from manual to automated, the benefits compound:

Stronger financial position: You catch a potential cash crunch two months earlier instead of two days before it hits, giving you time to adjust rather than scramble.

Faster, more confident growth: Capital gets deployed efficiently because you have real-time visibility into what's working. You can say "yes" to opportunities faster because the data supports quick decisions.

Exponential operational leverage: A three-person finance team can support a 200-person company as effectively as a 50-person company because AI handles the scaling complexity.

One early Arc customer told us: "With Archie, we went from spending dozens of hours a week analyzing what we were spending our cash on to better understanding how we should be spending that cash. Same time investment, completely different impact."

That's the shift we're building toward.

Where We Are Today

Phase 1 is here. Arc's CFO Agent (Archie) is already helping companies automate financial intelligence—answering complex questions, generating insights, and flagging risks in real time.

Phase 2 is where we’re heading next. The foundational models and workflows are being built, and the full vision of autonomous execution is not far away.

We're committed to both phases because we believe finance teams deserve the same leverage that every other function has gained over the past decade.

The future of finance isn't about replacing financial expertise—it's about amplifying it. It's about letting AI handle the mechanics so humans can focus on the strategy, judgment, and relationships that truly drive businesses forward.

At Arc, we're building toward that future: empowering companies to operate with intelligence, precision, and confidence—every day, in real time.