Finance teams keep getting handed a longer list: run the close, forecast cash, advise the business, and absorb every new rule about how money moves and how it gets reported. This list covers what a finance team needs to know right now, with each item tied to a change you can verify and a step you can take this quarter.
The short version: AI works best on one narrow job at a time, paper payments and PDF invoices are being regulated out, disclosure rules are getting more granular, and cash still decides how much room you have to move. The ten items below expand on each.
1. Where should a finance team start with AI?
Start with one bounded, repetitive job where a wrong answer is cheap to catch, such as drafting a first pass of payment reminders or matching remittances. Large institutions took this route first. JPMorgan Chase began with targeted uses like preparing briefing materials, reviewing legal documents and supporting call center staff before scaling further. The same logic applies to a ten person finance team: prove the tool on your own data, then widen its scope.
Be precise about the word agentic. A useful test is to ask what the software decides. An AR agent that ranks the book by likelihood to pay late, drafts outreach shaped by how each customer has paid before, and revises as behavior changes is making decisions. A scheduled email sequence with an AI label is a script.
2. Why do finance teams need operations-minded generalists?
The lines between FP&A, accounting, AR and revenue operations keep blurring. Financial operations joins financial strategy to day-to-day execution, which means working from live data and working across teams. Finance sits at the center of that web. Sales wants to know which deals will cash, customer success wants to know which accounts are at risk, and leadership wants one number it can trust. The people who thrive can read a contract, question a forecast and fix a broken workflow in the same week.
3. How should finance teams protect cash flow?
Cash comes from three places: outside investment, debt, or operations. Investment is never guaranteed and debt carries real cost, so cash generated by the business is the source you control. That puts receivables and payables under the microscope. Deloitte points to aged receivables and financial operations as areas where cash management gains are available. In practice, that means knowing which invoices are drifting before they go past due, and forecasting collections from how customers actually pay.
4. What does the end of paper checks mean for AR?
The US government is moving its own payments off paper. Executive Order 14247, signed in March 2025, directed Treasury to stop issuing paper checks for federal disbursements from September 30, 2025, with limited exceptions, citing fraud, theft and cost. Commercial checks are still common, but the direction is clear. Expect more ACH, wire, card and real-time payments, each with remittance detail arriving separately from the cash. Cash application that depends on someone reading a check stub will struggle as that mix shifts.
5. Are e-invoicing mandates coming for your business?
If you sell into Europe, probably. Countries are moving from PDF invoices to structured electronic invoices reported to tax authorities. France is a current example: from September 1, 2026, all businesses established in France must be able to receive e-invoices, large and mid-sized companies must also issue them, and small companies follow in September 2027. Check which entities you invoice from and into, ask your ERP and billing vendors how they support each country's format, and plan for invoices that leave through a certified platform instead of an email attachment.
6. What reporting changes should finance teams prepare for?
Public companies in the US face more granular income statement disclosures. FASB's ASU 2024-03 requires expense captions to be broken down into categories like employee compensation, depreciation and purchases of inventory, effective for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2026. Even private companies feel the pull, because investors and lenders compare against public peers. The practical work is upstream: clean mapping in the general ledger, so the numbers can be cut the way the rule and your board ask for them. Reporting also has a forward-looking side, and a predictable cash flow forecast is what leadership reads most closely.
7. Is your data connected well enough to act on?
Every finance team has data. The gap is between having it and using it. Deloitte describes analytics platforms as a core part of the CFO toolkit for spotting trends, risk and opportunity. None of that works if the ERP, CRM, billing system and bank feeds disagree. Before buying another dashboard, map where each number originates, where it gets copied by hand, and which reports someone rebuilds in a spreadsheet every month. Those manual joins are the first thing to automate.
8. Why is collections a cross-functional job?
Collections works when sales, customer success and finance share the same picture of each account. A dispute that sales could resolve in one call can sit in an AR queue for weeks. The harder question is scale: how do you keep a relationship-centric approach as invoice volume grows? The answer is to automate the routine follow-up and route exceptions to the person who owns the relationship, so collections stays about connections. Tesorio customers report 3x collector productivity on average, which is what that shift looks like in practice.
9. Should finance teams pay attention to stablecoins?
Pay attention, even if you are not acting yet. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, created the first federal framework for US payment stablecoins, including one to one reserve requirements and issuer licensing. For most B2B finance teams this is a watch item. It matters for treasury policy, for customers who may ask to pay this way, and for how your bank and payment processors plan to support it. Know who in your company would own the decision, and what controls you would need before accepting a new payment rail.
10. How does AI change the role of people in finance?
AI handles volume. People handle judgment, negotiation and relationships. The finance teams that come out ahead use technology to take tedious work off their people's plates, spotting cash risk early or automating routine collections, so the team spends its hours on customers and decisions. Plan roles around the work the software cannot do: resolving disputes, setting credit policy, explaining variances to leadership and deciding when to make an exception.
What should finance teams do next?
Pick the two or three items above that touch your team most directly, name an owner for each, and set a date to review progress. If cash flow and receivables are at the top of that list, see how an AR agent works across the order-to-cash cycle.
