Precon's finance team wanted to question their cash forecast the way they'd question a colleague. So we gave them one who never sleeps and never touches the books.
A cash forecast answers one question: will we have enough? The next question is always why. Why is March tight? Which customer is paying late? What happens if growth slows to 5%? Most forecasts can't answer those questions. Someone has to export the data and work it out by hand.
For Precon, we built a forecast that rebuilds itself every night from their ERP, and an AI analyst named Gerard who can explain any number in it.
A nightly sync pulls new and changed records from the ERP: general ledger, budget, bank and open orders. It stores them in a secure database and recomputes the rollups, so every page opens instantly in the morning. The forecast covers the current fiscal year plus the next three.
Each month follows one formula the team can check: closing cash = opening cash + change in cash. Click any cell and you see the exact arithmetic behind it.
Gerard is built on Claude Opus, Anthropic's most capable model. The team asks him questions in plain language, and he answers from the same numbers the forecast pages show.
What Gerard does:
→ Answers questions about any line, transaction, customer or loan.
→ Runs what-if scenarios on growth, collections and costs, without saving over the real forecast.
→ Shows his work, using 17 read-only tools to pull every figure he quotes.
An AI agent with access to your books is only useful if you can trust it. We designed Gerard so trust isn't a question. He can't create, change or delete a record. He has no internet access. Every request passes a role check, and the whole app sits behind single sign-on with MFA.
Claude's careful tool use makes this practical. Gerard picks the right tool, reads the result, and reasons across revenue timing, collections lag and loan payments before he answers. When he doesn't have the data, he says so.
"That's the whole idea, you've got to rethink how technology is going to work within your company. So I'd rather never have to use Power BI again.” Scott Cunningham, President, Precon Manufacturing
