Not everything that counts can be counted

Work has changed, and finance is no exception. As professionals, we will stop doing much of the work ourselves and become responsible for managing and configuring the Intelligence Systems that do it for us. In this essay, we explain how Praks supports finance teams in this new era.

The trouble with judgment is that it is hard to measure. It does not let the decision-maker hide behind the data without owning the path they chose. Yet, hard as it is to count, it is the work that counts most.

Judgment often defines how intelligence work should be carried out. It writes the answer key.

Judgment cannot, and should not, be outsourced.

We always hear that we should be data-driven. True, but we should not be data-determined. The same number can tell many stories, even before we get to that misclassified transaction that throws off every report.

Judgment is reading the number, but also listening to the customer, the market and everything else, to truly understand that line on the balance sheet and decide the company's next step from there. The story a number tells can be better, or worse, than you think.

Humanity's great achievements came from judgment: people who decided their careers or businesses should take different paths, based on the reality they saw and also on the one they believed in.

This does not mean intelligence work is easy or simple. In finance, it carries nuances and exceptions that make the routine tedious and error-prone, and it happens at an enormous scale of transactions, accounts and systems.

Today we are consumed by routines that demand nothing but method, and there is no time left to think and to help the team with the questions that need reflection and deliberation. It is a bad equation, both for the integrity of finance and for the value the business creates. It does not have to be this way.

We founded Praks because we believe artificial intelligence is a unique chance to put people back in the seat of decision and creativity, and take them out of repetitive execution. It is also the chance to guarantee good financial practice across every operational routine, at any scale, and with it the data integrity finance needs. A chance to invert the equation.

That is why PraksOS is an Intelligence System. Its AI agents carry out tasks the way people, through judgment, defined and designed them, in line with the company's policies, guidelines and goals, and our team adapts everything to how your company works.

Beyond automating controllership, we build a dataset that updates continuously and makes strategic finance analysis easier and better informed.

Get paid, and it is already reconciled. Pay, and it is already classified. The company's own routine feeds finance, because the AI agents are always listening.

And organized data enables (I) better AI and automation projects and (II) more reliable, more complete reports.

But there is one more thing: Praks is a team by your side. Our team adapts the system to your reality, builds new agents and becomes your right hand in keeping finance routines running.

So is Praks software or a service? Neither one alone: PraksOS integrates with your current systems and our team works alongside yours, so your finance team has more time for what it was built to do. Making the system work has always been your job. Now it is ours.

Our vision is a proactive finance team, with time to engage with the rest of the business and bring expertise and advice on how decisions in product, HR, technology, logistics, legal and elsewhere affect the value and results of the company.

Just as someone with a feature idea asks a developer whether it is feasible, or someone with a legal concern checks with the legal team whether it is allowed, every team would benefit from a finance team that shows up and advises on what matters most to the company: does this create value?

João Henrique, co-founderI remember a class I took with Professor Aswath Damodaran, a world reference in corporate finance. The class also covered the use of AI in companies and, after being bombarded with questions about how the technology could increase a business's value, he summed it up well:

“Like anything else, it matters to the extent that it affects expected future cash flows, or the risk of those cash flows being realized.”

Aswath Damodaran

Simple, and with a finance mind. There is a lot of nuance behind a sentence like that, nuance that only a finance team with time and with current, reliable information can help other teams explore.

Praks was founded to give that time back and guarantee that information, so Brazilian finance teams can do more.