What we learned from the first Tesorio Live about the work between Closed Won and cash in the bank.
Finance teams have a pretty good handle on when money is leaving the business. Payroll is scheduled. Vendor payments are scheduled. Debt payments are scheduled.
Getting paid is harder to pin down.
A deal can be signed, the invoice can be out the door, and the revenue can be booked. You still haven't been paid. Whether that happens on time depends on whether the invoice reached the right inbox or the right portal, whether anyone answered the customer's question, whether someone wrote down the promise to pay and then checked whether it held, whether the payment got matched, and whether the dispute reached the one person who could resolve it. Every one of those steps takes somebody's time.
That's the part of the job we started Tesorio Live to talk about. Twice a month we show what Tesorio is taking on across order-to-cash and answer questions live. The first one covered where Tesorio is headed, what the agents do today, and where a team should start if they haven't done any of this yet.
Make cash coming in as predictable as cash going out
Tesorio CEO Carlos Vega put it this way:
"You know when your AP's going out, when your payroll's going out, when every penny out the door is gonna leave your business. But when you're going to get paid is what we're all here to try and forecast and predict and make predictable."
The interesting part is that a lot of the data already exists on both sides. Your AR is someone else's AP. Most of what you'd need to predict an inflow already exists. It's just spread across inboxes, portals, ERPs, and the heads of the people doing the follow-up.
That's where Tesorio is headed: an end-to-end order-to-cash analyst that can take on more of what happens between the signed order and cash in the bank. The point isn't to give the team another queue to manage.
What's left for people to do
Carlos didn't dodge the obvious question about what any of this leaves for the people doing the work:
"Every ChatGPT and Claude query knows more than I do, than any of us do. But judgment, that cannot be outsourced."
Getting information is easier than it used to be. The harder part is still deciding what to do with it: which account is actually at risk, what to concede in a dispute, or when a customer needs a phone call instead of another email.
That's the work you want people spending their time on. They just shouldn't have to touch every routine step that comes before it.
What it looks like for an agent to do the work
T.J. Corkins, Principal Solutions Consultant, showed what that means in the product today.
He started with something every collections team deals with hourly. A customer replies to an email. Normally that means someone reads it, figures out what it means, updates the account, creates the follow-up, and decides whether to write back. In the demo, one inbound reply produced several pieces of work at once. The promise-to-pay date updated, tags applied, tasks created, and a reply drafted, with a record of every action the agent took and why.
Each of those actions has its own setting: off, drafted for review, or automatic. Teams pick which ones they hand over, and they can set different rules for different customer segments, so a strategic account isn't handled like a routine one. Escalation works the same way. Teams describe in their own words what should never get an automatic reply, whether that's a frustrated tone or a mention of legal, and those emails get tagged, assigned, and routed to a person.
Beyond the inbox, the Supplier Portals Agent logs into AP portals like Coupa and Ariba to submit invoices, then pulls PO status and other portal data back into Tesorio so matching can start against real PO numbers.
AI Chat and MCP let teams ask a question across their AR data instead of finding a report, exporting it, and reading it. In the session, T.J. asked what was happening with the invoices tied to one project. The answer came back with the reason they were unpaid: nobody had told the customer they had an invoice. Those invoices were 252 days old, which T.J. flagged as an artifact of the demo environment. No report to build, no export, and it pulled from email, tags, and invoice history across several customers at once.
Where should a finance team start?
The first question in the Q&A went to Steven Odell, who has spent more than 20 years running quote-to-cash teams and has been a Tesorio customer twice, at Slack and now at Contentful.
He started smaller than "where can AI transform finance." The requests his analysts field every day are a good place to start. I need a copy of that invoice. Here's my promise to pay. They come in constantly and the answer is always the same.
"Getting all that just routine, monotonous inquiries that we get day in and day out — use the agent for that, and then really free up our analysts and give them the bandwidth to manage the much larger issues."
The larger issues, in his example, look like reconciling a service order against an invoice so an AP team can release payment. That work needs somebody who understands the account.
That's also how Tesorio thinks about the division of work: agents handle the volume, humans handle the judgment. Steven's advice was practical. Start there, then see what it gives your analysts time to do.
Prioritization should be about more than aging
Another question from the session: how does Tesorio decide which accounts and invoices need attention?
Aging is part of the picture, but it isn't enough on its own. T.J. pointed to promise-to-pay as one of the largest signals, along with whether that customer has historically paid close to the dates they give you. A promise from someone who consistently misses their own date shouldn't carry the same weight as one from a customer who reliably keeps it.
Tesorio also compares an invoice against that customer's own history, so an unusual invoice doesn't get scored against an average that doesn't apply to it.
So the queue doesn't have to be another sorted aging report. What matters more is knowing which accounts actually need your team's attention today.
The work after Closed Won is changing
The opportunity isn’t to automate every judgment call. It’s to stop requiring a person for every routine step that gets cash from a signed deal into the bank.
That means less time managing the process, more time on the accounts, relationships, and decisions that actually need your team.
