The native capabilities of the Payhawk Financial Controller AI Agent are delivered as skills and playbooks, which can be run through AI chat.
A skill is a single, self-contained task; it performs one task from start to finish, such as looking something up, submitting or coding an expense, running an export.
A playbook is like a recipe. It chains several skills into an end-to-end workflow that reaches a single goal, such as closing the month or reviewing a batch of expenses.
Apart from the skills and playbooks Payhawk provides out of the box, you can build your own custom playbooks tailored to how your organization works.
Skills
The following table lists the skills the Financial Controller AI Agent supports, grouped by area.
A few skills, such as finding a person or asking how Payhawk works, are shared across every agent and the Financial Controller AI Agent can run them too.
Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
Expenses & receipts | |
Submit an expense | Guided submission in chat: validates the required fields, fills category, supplier and custom fields, submits. |
Upload and match receipts | Takes several receipts in one message and matches them to the right expenses. |
List my pending submissions | The expenses you still have to submit. |
Expense details and export readiness | One expense in full: line items, approval chain, and what blocks submission or export. |
Fetch an invoice from a vendor | Logs into the vendor portal, finds the invoice by amount and date, attaches and codes it. |
Submit an expense report | Submits your own trip or period report for approval, preview then confirm. |
Create an expense from a receipt | Creates a reimbursable or bill expense when a receipt matches nothing. |
Filtered expense search | Search by owner, card, supplier, team, category, workflow step, export state or due date. |
Unsubmit an expense | Pulls a submitted expense back to draft. |
View attached documents | Shows the receipts and invoices on an expense, inline. |
Invoice inbox address | The address suppliers can forward invoices to. |
List expense reports | Trip and period reports with their type, status, period and total. |
View an expense report | One report: type, status, period, total and item count. |
Expense payments | When an expense was paid or reimbursed, and at which rate. |
Review, coding & close | |
List expenses pending review | Your review queue, as it stands now. |
Complete or return a review | Finishes a review, or sends it back to the employee with a reason. |
Bulk recode | Recodes everything matching a rule you state (category, tax or custom field). |
Close blockers | What still needs coding or a document before the period can close. |
Chase owners on their expenses | Posts one comment tagging the owners, on up to 25 expenses at once. Preview then confirm. |
Look up categories, tax rates and fields | The reference data behind coding: categories, tax rates, custom fields and account codes. |
Approvals & attention | |
List pending approvals | What is waiting on your approval, and how much of it. |
Approve, reject or return an expense | Handles an approval request on one expense. |
Bulk approve by criteria | Approves everything that matches a rule you state, on confirmation. |
Approve or return an expense report | Approves or returns a submitted report at your step; returning needs a reason. |
Budgets | |
Budget versus actuals | Budget against actual and committed, broken down by any dimension. |
Accounting & exports | |
Run an accounting export | Queues one export template over a period, preview then confirm. |
Failed exports | Expenses whose last export failed, with the accounting system's own error text. |
Unexported items | What has not reached the accounting system yet for the period. |
Export history | What was exported when, and every attempt on one expense. |
Export templates | The configured export templates: name, format and target system. |
Cash, funds & FX | |
Upcoming payments | Supplier bills due and payments scheduled in the coming days. |
Setup & configuration | |
Show reminder settings | Reads back the chasing schedule you have live. |
Customise the chasing schedule | Authors a schedule in plain English: hour, weekday, days from the event, grace period, month-end offsets. |
Manage the chasing exclusion list | Stops chasing someone, and lists who is excluded. |
In every conversation | |
Audit trail | Who did what on an expense, card or request, or the account trail over a period. |
Read a comment thread | The comments on an expense, with who wrote each one. |
How does Payhawk work? | Answers how Payhawk works and what is switched on here, citing its sources. |
Playbooks
The following table lists the playbooks the Financial Controller Agent supports, grouped by area.
Playbook | What it does |
|---|---|
Review, coding & close | |
Month-end close | Eight steps and five gates: code, settle tax, chase documents, clear approvals, review, export, pick up rejections. |
Expense review | Batch review end to end - coding and document checks, with approval and sign-off kept apart. |
Coding consistency and defaults | Finds inconsistent coding, classifies why, sets supplier defaults on confirmation and recodes the outliers. |
Approvals & attention | |
Approval inbox triage | A ranked cross-entity approval queue for you, acted on in the conversation. |
Budgets | |
Budget burn and overspend forecast | Which budgets are trending to overspend, and what is driving them. |
Spend insights & reporting | |
Spend report | A written report with the figures, a period comparison and charts. |
Spend anomaly review | Surfaces unusual spend and its drivers, drills into the items and queries the owners. |
Finance process KPIs | Time to submit, approve and review per team, and what is stuck right now. |
Multi-entity (group) rollup | A consolidated cross-entity view of spend, balances and attention items. |
Finance benchmarking (peers and entities) | Your spend mix, process and card programme against peers, and which entities lag. |