How Hyperbots’ Payment Discount Agent Cuts Leakages

A conversation between Jace Kitchen, AE at Hyperbots, and Shalini Urankar, CEO of IkigAI Advisory

The Productivity Breakthrough of Always-On Finance Automation

Jace Kitchen: Your finance bots now work while everyone sleeps. How big of a productivity boost has that delivered for you guys?

Shalini Urankar: It's been quite transformational, actually. Routine finance tasks run overnight, so by morning, the team just has to come in and look into exceptions or focus on judgment calls that need to be made. When we first implemented overnight automation, it was almost like adding five to seven virtual FTEs without increasing the headcount. We saw almost a 40% drop in cycle time. So it was quite huge.

I've had conversations with peers in global shared services—I used to run global shared services at P&G, so I still chat with my colleagues around the globe. The ones who have been brave enough to adopt bots are seeing this dynamic too: bots reconciling while teams are sleeping and then handing it off as a ready-to-review set of items by morning.

Midnight Invoice Processing: No More Inbox Backlogs

Jace Kitchen: What actually happens overnight on the invoice front?

Shalini Urankar: Invoices arriving at midnight don't just sit in the inbox anymore waiting for someone to come look at it in the morning. The bot will extract, match, code, and post them right after midnight—by like 12:05 AM. So when AP logs in at eight, there's only a few flagged issues left. Anything that's an exception or needs intervention to be looked at.

We've seen huge efficiencies from this. At one of my biotech clients, we actually cut invoice backlog from three days to same-day posting. It completely changed the whole vendor satisfaction and spend visibility aspect of things at that client.

Real-Time Tax Validation Around the Clock

Jace Kitchen: How does the round-the-clock operation improve sales tax validation for you?

Shalini Urankar: The big difference is that tax validation happens in real time instead of the next day. Discrepancies never reach the GL. Again, like I mentioned, invoices that land at midnight are extracted, matched, coded, and posted right after midnight. Then when AP starts in the morning at eight o'clock, they deal only with flagged issues. Typically there'll be half a dozen, sometimes more, depending on the situation.

We've caught recurring use tax overcharges at multiple vendors. They might be small per invoice, but one of the companies that I advised saved over $200,000 in avoided leakage. That's a big number for an SME. Each transaction is almost tax-audited before it's booked, thanks to these bots.

Month-End Accruals: From Chaos to Calm

Jace Kitchen: Month-end accruals used to be chaos. What's different now for you?

Shalini Urankar: The accrual copilot is a game changer, right? It automatically books and reverses journals as invoices flow, even if it's 11:59 on the last day. When we piloted this, it shortened our close by a whole day. I mean, a whole day. That's a lot of time. And eliminated late-night manual accruals as well. My controller was the happiest person on Earth.

Eliminating Vendor Onboarding Bottlenecks

Jace Kitchen: Vendor onboarding is another bottleneck. How does the 24/7 bot working help?

Shalini Urankar: We used to lose days validating W-9s and banking info. Now a supplier uploads, say, early morning at 2 AM, and procurement already has a verified vendor and a ready PO. This kind of automation has saved us a lot of hours.

In big companies—if I think of prior jobs I've done, like at Iron Mountain—we used to have over 10,000 vendors across all of North America. Something like this would have saved us countless hours back then, or even now if they want to implement it.

Payment Reconciliation While You Sleep

Jace Kitchen: Describe payment reconciliation outside of office hours.

Shalini Urankar: The way the process works is the bank files land at about 3 AM. The payment copilot matches and posts the cash clearing. So essentially, the Treasury comes into a zero-difference cash book every morning at 9 AM.

When I implemented daily bank reconciliations through automation at a client, it freed up 15% of their finance team's time and provided CFO-level visibility into cash positioning first thing every morning. That's something which typically takes my team days to pull together. So it was a huge, huge efficiency. It was almost like a breakthrough from a productivity standpoint.

Proactive Payment Timing and Working Capital Optimization

Jace Kitchen: Proactive payment timing—what would be your recommendations?

Shalini Urankar: This is where AI gets exciting, right? The bot continuously scans for early-pay discounts. We've captured a $2,500 saving on a $250K invoice over a holiday weekend. That's a small example, but multiplied over hundreds of invoices, it's real working capital value creation—not just efficiency.

We all know in finance that cash is king. Anything we can do to increase the receipt of cash is always a huge thing for us. You can ask any CFO, any controller, any finance leader, and you'll get the same sentiment.

The Human Element in 24/7 Automation

Jace Kitchen: Where do humans fit in when the bots run 24/7?

Shalini Urankar: Bots do the heavy lifting, but humans do the sense-making, right? We're finance—we trust but verify. I like to call it the 80/20 shift. Eighty percent of the time used to go into gathering the data. Now that 80% goes towards interpreting and deciding and helping drive the right decisions for the company.

What I've seen is bots queue mismatches early in the morning. When approvers come in at eight or nine, they see a concise list with context and links. They need to verify it and then just step in for exceptions or strategic calls. Today, humans don't have to do all the grunt work behind the scenes. They can just handle judgment calls. And that's what drives the real ROI, right?

Finance teams can contribute in so many different parts of the business. I can essentially reuse my analysts who used to spend time doing all this manual work to help sales drive more top line and help grow the company. That's one example, but there are many, many other places where they can help with a lot more strategic work.

Your Daily Morning Briefing

Jace Kitchen: What kind of morning report do you receive?

Shalini Urankar: It's great. There's a concise Teams or email digest: invoices processed, invoices reconciled, exceptions flagged—it's all included in that. It feels like getting almost like a night shift handoff from a virtual finance team that never sleeps. As a CFO, that allows me to start my day already informed versus waiting for updates or chasing my team to give me updates.

Hyperbots' Competitive Edge: True 24/7 Coverage

Jace Kitchen: How does Hyperbots' 24/7 bot coverage compare with competitors' time windows?

Shalini Urankar: Talking to my CFO peers and other finance leaders here in the northeast community, what I'm finding out is most vendors still run batch jobs. Tax checks are done once a day, vendor validations are done during office hours. Hyperbots operates in a continuous mode across AP—not only AP, but tax, payments, and accruals. It's almost like it's running 24/7, right?

No Premium Pricing for Off-Hours Processing

Jace Kitchen: Do rivals charge extra if you want off-hour processing?

Shalini Urankar: Yes, yes. That's definitely the case. And that's where Hyperbots is differentiated. I've seen competitors charge 25% to 30% more for premium schedules. Hyperbots builds this follow-the-sun schedule—24/7 coverage—into the core value proposition, not as an add-on.

Flexible Controls for Business Needs

Jace Kitchen: Can you throttle bots to business hours only if needed?

Shalini Urankar: Yeah, absolutely. Audit and IT loved that toggle. You can pause during maintenance or blackout periods. In one engagement, we used it during an ERP cutover to control transaction timing without disabling the entire process. I think that's great to have that ability.

Real-World Value: The $2,500 Weekend Discovery

Jace Kitchen: Any real-world incident that proved that value for you?

Shalini Urankar: Yeah. During a long weekend, our bot picked up an early-pay discount that saved us $2,500 overnight. Nobody even knew it was there. It was almost a light bulb moment for the team because it made us realize that, hey, bots don't need PTO and they never miss a mistake. That's huge.

Security and Control in Unattended Processing

Jace Kitchen: How do you keep unattended processing secure and controlled?

Shalini Urankar: Security is the most critical thing, right? That's something we always pay attention to. What we can do here is enforce role-based access. It basically enables end-to-end encryption and immutable audit logs, which also is great during the whole audit process.

As you know, I've been a CFO for a biotech startup, and we were always handling sensitive R&D grant funding. We designed really strict escalation protocols. If a posting fails, for example, the bots retry three times, then route exceptions to designated approvers and reviewers. Automation doesn't necessarily mean loss of control. In my opinion, it actually strengthens governance.

Scalability Without Headcount Constraints

Jace Kitchen: Looking forward, how do you see the 24/7 bot scaling versus competition?

Shalini Urankar: The beauty of digital agents is the scalability part. As volumes grow, you can just spin up an additional agent for more capacity—no incremental license or headcount bottleneck. In bigger companies that I worked in, we dealt with billions in transactions across 20+ countries sometimes. Scalability was the biggest pain point. The only way you could do it was by throwing more and more people at it, and that always added a lot of additional cost. This 24/7 architecture eliminates that constraint.

The Bottom Line: Measurable Business Impact

Jace Kitchen: What's the bottom line impact of the non-stop finance bots?

Shalini Urankar: Invoice cycle time goes down 40%. Early-pay discounts are up three times. Vendor inquiries—I've seen them go down by up to 60%. And close is much faster—faster by a day or even more sometimes. That's not just productivity. It's actual working capital gain, actual margin improvement, and real improved team morale.

This isn't just a gimmick. The 24/7 ability through agents and bots is soon going to be a new baseline for digital finance operations.