Meet Max: your 24/7 accounting agent

Every month, accounting teams fight the same battle: transforming fragmented business activity into financial truth. Downloading transactions. Chasing down accruals. Building variance schedules. Matching transactions. Reconstructing context from dozens of disconnected systems long after other departments  have moved on.

What should be an analytical, value-adding function has become consumed by preparation work. The consequences are becoming impossible to ignore:

• The number of people entering the profession is at an all time low.

• The number of public companies restating financials due to accounting errors is at an all time high.

• Pressure from new accounting standards, fragmented systems, and rising business complexity is intensifying.

For years, the default solution has been simple: hire more accountants. But the uncomfortable reality is that accounting operations have outgrown human capacity. The work is too high-volume, too evidence-heavy, and too repetitive to be solved by manual effort. Modern businesses generate millions of transactions across payroll systems, banks, billing platforms, procurement tools, CRMs, and data warehouses. Financial truth is distributed across dozens of systems, while internal accounting controls compound the amount of documentation, and review required.

The result is operational chaos where complexity grows faster than accounting teams can scale.

The problem with legacy accounting software

Enterprise Rock Problem

For decades, nearly every technology investment in accounting flowed into the ERP. It became the system of record: where transactions were posted, controls were enforced, and financial statements were produced. But the ERP never prepared the work. Everything around it stayed manual.

Dumb Checklists

Checklist tools like BlackLine and FloQast tracked the month-end close work. They provided updates on what’s left to be done but the work was still performed by humans. These checklists were built around a fundamental assumption: humans prepare the work (99.9% burden), software coordinates the work (0.1% burden). As accounting complexity exploded, that assumption became the bottleneck.

• Coordination instead of preparation: Close checklists tracked human performed work, assign owners, and manage deadlines. But it never changed who prepared the reconciliations, journal entries, support schedules, and variance explanations. The checklist says "complete." But the work was still performed by an army of tired humans.

• Trial balances instead of transaction-level truth: Legacy close tools operate at the trial balance level, but accounting work happens at the transaction level. When something looks wrong, accountants still have to leave the system, pull source data, and manually reconstruct what happened.

• Fragmented data = fragmented context: Legacy close tools were built when the ERP was the center of gravity. Today, the accounting context lives across dozens of upstream systems (banks, cards, payroll, procurement, equity….) and accountants spend their time stitching together financial truth before they can even begin the accounting work.

• AI as a feature, not a foundation: Legacy vendors responded to AI by adding chatbots. But did nothing to create a financial data lake, build accounting specific agents or introduce accounting intelligence. Accountants still gather the data, prepare the work, and review the output - the hamster wheel did not stop.

Why a system of work, not another AI tool

In a world where agentic AI has become central to every type of knowledge work, the old operating model breaks entirely. 

Many teams are now trying to layer AI onto the existing accounting stack: one tool to draft variance explanations, another to answer accounting questions, another to generate journal entries. But agents that operate in isolation lack context. They cannot see the complete lifecycle of a transaction: where it originated, how it was transformed, what policies were applied, what supporting evidence exists, and what should happen next.

Like close management software before it, AI point solutions streamlined individual tasks without changing the underlying operating model. Data without action creates more work. Actions without context create risk.

What accounting needs is not another system of record. It needs a system of work. An agentic system of work brings together data, context, reasoning, and execution into a single platform. It becomes the operating layer between transaction systems and the ERP, where humans and agents work from the same financial truth, apply the same accounting policies, and execute against the same objectives.

The foundation Max is built on

Last winter, we introduced Maxima’s agentic system of work for accounting. Built on a unified Finance Graph and natively connected to the systems where financial truth lives, Maxima spans the accounting lifecycle—from transaction ingestion and transformation to journal entries, reconciliations, variance analysis, reporting, and close execution. 

It’s architected around three core pillars:

Agentic Transactional Accounting  (the preparation layer)

• Data ingestion – pulls and normalizes activity from banks, payroll, billing, and the data warehouse, so no one is exporting CSVs by hand.

• Workbook schedules – builds the accrual, prepaid, and amortization schedules that normally live in spreadsheets.

• Audit-ready journal entries – drafts entries with the calculation, policy applied, and supporting evidence attached to every line.

• Transaction matching – ties bank-to-ledger, invoice-to-payment, and intercompany across systems, and flags what doesn't reconcile.

Agentic Close Orchestrator (executes month-end)

• Account reconciliations – prepares balance-sheet recs with support gathered and variances explained.

• Adjustment entries – proposes the true-ups and reclasses that usually surface late in the close.

• Support collection – chases and attaches the documentation reviewers and auditors ask for.

• Close execution – runs the checklist, tracks prepared vs. pending, and keeps the close moving.

Accounting Intelligence  (the analytical layer)

• Flux and variance explanations – drafts the month-over-month story with the driving transactions linked.

• Reporting packages – assembles the recurring reporting accountants rebuild every period.

• Exception surfacing – flags anomalies, errors, and maverick spend before they reach the financials.

Today, it is deployed at enterprises including Rippling, Zendesk, Scale AI, and Bilt Rewards, with more than $400 billion in accounting transaction volume processed on the platform. The result is a system capable of performing the repetitive, evidence-heavy, low-judgment work that has historically consumed the majority of accounting hours. 

Max is what now sits on top of it.

Meet Max, the 24/7 accounting agent

Today, we’re introducing Max: the 24/7 accounting agent that teams can delegate their most manual, painful, and recurring preparation work to every month.

Unlike scripted automation or generic AI chatbots, Max reasons through each workflow, takes action across your systems, coordinates with stakeholders, and escalates for human review and approval whenever needed. Think of it as your teammate that never forgets a step, never loses context, and documents every action it takes. Every output is traceable, auditable, and automatically routed through the same approval workflows, policies, and controls that govern the rest of your accounting organization.

Built on top of Maxima’s agentic system of work, Max operates with complete accounting context across your systems. It understands where transactions originated, how they should be transformed, which policies apply, what evidence is required, and how outputs should be reviewed before posting. The result is accounting work prepared at the level of quality expected from an experienced accountant, producing real deliverables like workbook schedules, journal entries, balance sheet reconciliations, variance explanations, and supporting documentation.

What this looks like day to day

When an accountant logs into Maxima’s agentic system of work in the morning, the recurring work for the period is already underway or already complete.

• Payroll entries have been prepared and routed for review.

• Accrual estimates have been calculated and supported.

• Commission schedules have been updated.

• Depreciation, amortization, and lease schedules have rolled forward.

• Cash activity has been reconciled.

• Intercompany balances have been matched.

• Variance explanations have been drafted, with supporting transactions linked and traceable.

Less time downloading transactions and stitching together context. More time understanding the numbers, identifying risk, partnering with the business, and helping move the company forward.

The results

Teams running Max are already seeing what happens when preparation moves off the human team:

• Scale AI: 70% faster close cycles, with significant hours redirected to reviews and analysis

• Guild: Monthly sabbatical accruals instead of quarterly, with 80% less prep time

• InDrive: 2 days saved every close cycle and eliminated reliance on outsourcing

• Pressed Juicery: 12x faster health benefit cost allocation journal entries