Servicely says AI cuts finance billing time by 92%

Servicely says AI is delivering its quickest returns for finance teams in back-office billing, citing a customer that cut invoice preparation time by 92%.

The Sydney-based service management software group argues finance leaders are focusing too heavily on customer-facing tools, even though manual work in chargeable service assessment and invoice preparation offers a more immediate source of savings.

As an example, Servicely pointed to work by BUCS IT, which uses the platform to automate the assessment of chargeable tickets and invoice preparation. According to the companies, the process had previously taken two days per Team Lead each month.

"Since deploying Servicely, we've cut the time to assess chargeable tickets and prepare invoices by 92% - down from two days per Team Lead every month to almost nothing," said Roland Gemmert, Head of Business Development Systems at BUCS IT.

"For a finance and service team, that's not a marginal gain. It's days handed back every month, and far fewer errors in our billing. Automating the unglamorous finance-adjacent work turned out to be one of the highest-value things we did."

Back-office focus

Dion Williams, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Servicely, said the economics of AI in finance should be judged on operating cost rather than novelty. In his view, software that completes routine service and administrative tasks from start to finish offers a clearer investment case than tools that only handle queries or draft responses.

"For CFOs, the agentic AI story is really a cost story," Williams said.

"When AI can resolve routine service and back-office requests end to end, rather than just logging them, you take cost out of operations without losing the people who add value. The mistake is chasing a flashy front-office chatbot while the repetitive finance work everyone tolerates goes untouched."

Williams said this reflected a broader shift in how finance teams should assess automation projects. Many business systems, he argued, still function mainly as systems of record, while staff do the real work outside the workflow.

"The platforms most organisations run are systems of record - they log the request and track it while a person does the actual work," he said.

"Agentic AI changes that. It can take the task from start to finish, which is exactly what you want pointed at high-volume, rules-based finance processes like billing, approvals and reconciliation prep."

Cost discipline

Williams also said finance executives should apply the same scrutiny to AI spending as they would to any other technology purchase. That means understanding the running costs of individual tools, measuring whether tasks are actually being resolved, and treating heavy model usage as a direct budget item.

"Apply the rigour you'd apply anywhere," he said.

"Know what each AI capability actually costs to run, demand measurable resolution rates rather than vague 'productivity' claims, and treat runaway model consumption as a real budget line. The winners this year won't be the businesses that spend the most on AI - they'll be the ones who can show a clear return."

For financial services companies, governance will determine whether wider deployment is viable, Williams said. Systems that take action rather than simply answer questions must operate within defined permissions and leave a clear audit trail, particularly in regulated settings.

"Financial institutions can't treat agentic AI like a consumer tool. The moment an agent takes an action rather than just answering, every action has to be permission-bound, auditable and reversible, and the data it works with has to stay where compliance requires. That isn't a barrier to adoption - it's the design brief."

Founded in Sydney in 2019, Servicely sells service management software to organisations in financial services and other regulated industries. Williams previously introduced ServiceNow to the Australian market through an earlier business before starting Servicely as what he described as a leaner, AI-native option for mid-sized companies.

The company presented the issue as part of a broader rethink of where AI creates value in finance operations. Rather than focusing only on the customer-facing side of financial technology, finance leaders should look more closely at repetitive internal work that can be standardised and checked, it said.

"The opportunity on World FinTech Day isn't just to celebrate the front end of finance," Williams said.

"It's to look honestly at the manual work still sitting in your finance operations, and ask which of it a well-governed AI agent could simply do. For most organisations, that list is longer than they think - and the payback is faster than they expect."