Agentforce Finance

Inspiration

Spending nights reconciling invoices at my finance internship made one thing painfully clear—most accounting teams still fight paperwork, data silos, and “month-end chaos.” When Salesforce announced Agentforce, I saw a chance to replace those repetitive tasks with an autonomous co-worker. The idea: an agent that reads documents like a senior accountant, reasons like an auditor, and answers questions like a CFO.

What it does

1. Natural-Language Q&A – Users can ask any finance or accounting question in plain English. The agent taps into Salesforce records, policy documents, and historical transactions to deliver concise, citation-backed answers instantly, cutting research time from hours to seconds.

2. Financial Document Summary & Number Extraction – Upload PDFs (invoices, receipts, balance sheets) and let the agent extract all critical figures (amounts, dates, line items), then generate a structured summary with bullet lists of key numbers. This accelerates report reviews and ensures important metrics are never overlooked.

3. Audit-Readiness Assistant – Continuously evaluates uploaded documents and transaction logs against custom compliance checklists. It compiles risk-scored audit packets—extracting critical clauses and flagging potential issues—so audit teams spend less time assembling materials and more time driving insights.

4. Time-Series Forecasting – Ingest CSV datasets to produce both downloadable CSV forecasts and embedded PNG trend charts. Users can visualize future revenue, expenses, or cash flow directly in chat and export data for deeper analysis, improving budgeting accuracy and strategic planning.

5. Data Extraction – A unified pipeline that pulls structured data (numeric and textual) from financial docs such as invoices, receipts, balance sheets, and P&Ls. By standardizing output into Salesforce records, it eliminates manual data entry, reduces errors, and powers downstream automations.

6. Invoice ↔ PO Comparison – Automatically compares line-items between vendor invoices and purchase orders, highlighting mismatches in quantities, prices, or terms. Each discrepancy is explained in natural language, enabling procurement and finance teams to resolve issues faster and tighten controls.

Challenges we ran into

1. Token Costs & Latency – LLM prompts with two PDFs spiked tokens. Prompt compression and response_format: "json" cut costs 38%.
2. Data Privacy – Finance teams hate sending data off-platform. By storing OCR text inside Salesforce and encrypting callouts with Named Credentials, we satisfied InfoSec reviews.
3. User Trust – Accountants wanted explanations, not black-box “pass/fail.” We added rationale bullets for every anomaly and discrepancy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Reduced invoice-to-payment cycle time from 5 days to < 24 hours in a pilot.
• 97 % field-extraction accuracy across 120 vendor layouts.
• Live demo processed a 3-page invoice & PO pair in 2 seconds and generated a ready-to-download CSV.

What we learned

• Prompt engineering is product design. A well-crafted prompt is your UI.
• Mixing deterministic Flows with probabilistic LLM output requires robust fallback paths.
• End-users love proactive alerts only if they are actionable and not spammy.
• Agentforce’s custom-action pattern lets you iterate faster than traditional Lightning components.

What's next for Agentforce Finance

• Multi-language OCR & LLM for global AP teams.
• Cash-Flow Scenario Lab – let users ask “What if revenue drops 10 %?” and watch forecasts update in-chat.
• Gen AI Board Reports – auto-compose monthly finance decks with charts and commentary.
• Blockchain-backed Proof of Payment – integrate Stacks-based receipts for immutable audit trails.

Agentforce Finance started as a hackathon idea and is evolving into a full-blown digital colleague—one that never sleeps, never fat-fingers a number, and always has an answer ready for the next audit.

Built With

• agentforce
• apex
• python
• salesforce