Finocket can watch your books while you get on with the day. There are exactly three words to learn, and deliberately no fourth: an agent is who is working, an automation is what it does and when, and activity is what it actually did and what that cost.
All three live on one screen, Automations. If you can hold those three words, you can hold the whole feature.
An agent is who is working
Think of an agent the way you think of somebody you have taken on for one kind of work. You give it a name. You decide what it is allowed to see. You decide what it is allowed to spend. And you can send it home at any moment.
- Permissions — the parts of your books this agent may read, and nothing beyond them. An agent you set up to watch overdue invoices cannot open your payroll, however you word its instructions, because it was never given the door key.
- A budget — a most-it-may-spend on a single run, and a most-it-may-spend in a month. When it reaches a limit it stops and tells you it stopped. It never keeps going and settles up afterwards.
- An off switch — pause it, or delete it. Pausing takes effect immediately: nothing scheduled after that moment runs. There is no wind-down period and nothing queued that still gets through.
You will usually want a small number of agents with clear names — Receivables watch, Stock watch, GST week — rather than one agent that does everything. A named agent is something you can hold in your head, and its permissions stay narrow because its work is narrow.
An automation is what it does, and when
An agent on its own does nothing at all. It needs an automation: one piece of work, on a schedule you set. Every weekday at 9am, check which invoices went overdue yesterday. On the 5th of the month, check whether last month's sales and purchase figures agree with each other.
You do not write these from scratch. You pick one from a ready-made list, written and checked by us, and you choose the timings and the thresholds that suit your business — the hour it runs, the amount that counts as worth telling you about, the number of days that counts as late. One agent can carry several automations, and each one can be switched on and off on its own.
Every automation shows you what it will cost per month before you switch it on, and you can change your mind afterwards without penalty. See What automations cost.
Activity is what it did, and what it cost
Every single run is written down, whether it found something or not. Activity shows you the agent, the automation, when it ran, how long it took, what it concluded and what it spent. Nothing happens off the record.
This matters most for the runs that found nothing. A quiet day is recorded as checked, nothing to report — not as an empty space. An automation that has broken and an automation that has nothing to say would otherwise look exactly the same on screen, and you would read the reassuring one every time.
Anything an agent does that changes your books also lands in your ordinary Activity timeline alongside the things your team did, named as the agent that did it.
Most days, it has nothing to say — and that is the point
A watch on your books is not a stream of notifications. On a normal Tuesday, when nothing has gone overdue, nothing has run short and nothing has drifted, the automation runs, finds nothing, records that it found nothing, and you hear absolutely nothing. That is the ordinary case, not a failure.
You are told when something needs you: a customer who has crossed from late into properly late, stock that will run out before your next delivery, a month whose figures do not tie up. The value is not in being told things constantly; it is in not having to remember to look.
And when it does tell you something, it stops there. An agent brings you the finding. Whether anything is sent, filed, paid or changed is still your call — see What an agent will never do.
Getting your first one running
Open Automations, create an agent, give it a name and tick only the parts of your books it needs. Add one automation from the list, set the timing, read the monthly cost, and switch it on. Come back to Activity after a few days and read what it has been doing. One agent, one automation, for a fortnight is a much better start than five on the first afternoon.
Related: What automations cost, What an agent will never do, Approvals & automation.