An AI Finance Agent That Cut Month-End Reporting From Days to Hours

Every reporting cycle at Orchard Foods carried a quiet tax: assembly. Monthly flash reports were consolidated by hand across multiple business units and markets. Variance commentary lived in Excel and took days per cycle, with quality varying from region to region.

Worse, the company ran on a decades-old on-premise ERP with no APIs — every figure had to be pulled through manual screen navigation. Analysts were spending most of their time chasing inputs, formatting spreadsheets and drafting commentary, not analysing anything.

MintoraX started with a single, high-pain use case: month-end flash reporting. We built an AI agent that owns the full cycle — collecting inputs from each business unit, sending follow-ups and escalations automatically, consolidating figures, and drafting management-ready commentary with variance explanations, severity ranking and suggested corrective actions.

A human-in-the-loop review step keeps analysts in control: nothing reaches leadership without sign-off. To drive adoption, the agent was introduced internally as a named digital team member — “Mira” — with a role description and an assigned manager in the FP&A team.

Trust was built in stages: two months in shadow mode running alongside the manual process, then co-pilot mode, then autonomous operation once the outputs had earned it.

The agent went live in under 30 days and now automates 80–90% of report structuring before human review. The finance team has reclaimed over 700 analyst hours a year — roughly 18 working weeks — and month-end commentary that took days is drafted in hours.

Analysts have shifted from assembling data to validating insights and advising leadership, and Orchard is now extending the same agent platform into market insights and HR reporting.