Financial Automation in Practice

Q&A on Growing Without Inflating Your Team

Talking about financial automation is no longer about tools; it's about how to sustain growth without breaking your team along the way.

In practice, the challenge for finance leaders isn't deciding whether to automate, but how to do it while the finance department continues operating, putting out fires, responding to urgent business needs, and maintaining control.

This article compiles the main takeaways from a chat between Catarina Pinheiro, CFO at Abstra, and Bernardo Barbosa, Finance Director at Jusbrasil.

The conversation was less about technology and more about tough decisions, prioritization, culture, and the real role of finance in fast-growing companies.

The full recording is available here.

When did it become clear that the financial model wasn't scalable?

The turning point rarely comes from a single error or critical incident.

It emerges when:

• volume grows,
• complexity increases,
• and finance starts operating at the limit of human capacity, relying too heavily on specific individuals and manual controls.

At Jusbrasil, it became clear that insisting on the existing model would mean growing alongside:

• risk,
• rework,
• and team burnout.

Financial automation began to be seen not as a one-time efficiency gain, but as a necessary structural change to sustain the next stage of growth.

How to balance day-to-day operations with process improvement?

This was one of the most honest questions from the chat:

How did you balance the finance department's day-to-day, putting out fires, with process improvement?

The answer is direct: it wasn't simple, and there's no ready-made formula.

For a long time, automation progressed slower than desired because finance still had to respond to real business urgencies. This doesn't disappear overnight.

What made a difference was:

• aligning expectations,
• accepting that not everything would move at the ideal pace,
• and consciously prioritizing.

Understanding what needed to be resolved now, what could wait, and, crucially, accepting that some automations would be delayed was part of the process.

The turning point happened between 2023 and 2024, when finance stopped being just reactive. Even with fires, the team started reserving space to improve processes — and, over time, the frequency of problems itself began to decrease.

What changes when finance becomes more strategic?

When people talk about "strategic finance," many imagine speeches or new job titles. In practice, the change is much more concrete.

Finance ceases to be just the area that:

• demands budgets,
• points out deviations,
• reacts after a problem has already occurred.

And starts to anticipate decisions.

At Jusbrasil, this becomes apparent when the team can:

• cross-reference cloud data (Google, AWS) with actual consumption,
• identify inefficiencies before they become problems,
• bring insights to technology, product, and leadership,
• support infrastructure, pricing, and growth decisions.

None of this would be possible without automating operational processes. Without it, there's no time — or mental energy — for analysis.

How to bring the team along and break free from rigid thinking?

Culture doesn't change through discourse. It changes through example.

In Jusbrasil's case, the transformation began within the finance department itself, driven by a genuine restlessness:

"we need to do things differently, even without knowing exactly how."

Leadership's role was to:

• provide space to test,
• accept failure,
• encourage learning,
• recognize those who try to improve processes.

Even if the entire company isn't yet at this stage, the manager can transform their own unit. When results appear, the culture spreads naturally.

Does automation reduce control or help generate value?

There's a recurring fear that automating means losing control.

In practice, the opposite happens.

Automation ensures:

• traceability,
• standardization,
• clear rules, without requiring constant manual effort.

With this, the team gains space for:

• analyses,
• recommendations,
• business support.

The error lies in treating control and value generation as opposites. Well-executed automation strengthens both.

Which automated process generated the most impact?

Initially, the focus was on internal routines:

• reconciliations,
• reimbursements,
• closing,
• trial balance processing.

But one of the biggest gains came when they started automating revenue analyses, where the data volume is much higher.

The main challenge was moving beyond spreadsheets.

Manual modeling:

• generates errors,
• breaks down,
• doesn't scale.

When rules and projections began running automatically, the level of analysis changed completely.

Is there team resistance to automation and AI?

Little — largely due to the company's culture.

Still, it's common for automation and AI to be associated with loss of roles or relevance. Over time, the exact opposite happened: people began to feel more valued and more relevant.

How to measure success in financial automation?

There isn't a specific KPI for "number of automations" — and this was a conscious decision.

Creating such metrics generates the wrong incentive.

The focus isn't on automating everything, but on solving real problems.

The indicators remain the classics:

• efficiency,
• information quality,
• predictability,
• ability to anticipate risks.

Automation is a means, not an end.

What hasn't changed with AI (and people forget)?

The basics remain the basics.

AI doesn't replace:

• business understanding,
• financial logic,
• responsibility for decisions.

If the data is bad, AI merely scales the error. It accelerates paths, but doesn't create clarity on its own.

When did finance become a real business partner?

Between late 2023 and 2024.

That's when the team started bringing insights proactively and began to be called upon for strategic decisions.

It became clear then that something had changed.

Key Takeaways

The biggest takeaway from the chat is simple yet profound:

financial automation is not a technology project — it's a structural transformation.

Growing with control requires:

• process clarity,
• conscious prioritization,
• governance from the outset,
• and real people involvement.

Well-structured automation doesn't replace the team. It creates space for finance to act more strategically, predictably, and sustainably.

👉 To understand how to structure financial automation with governance from the first workflow, learn more about Abstra: https://www.abstra.io/pt/solucoes/financas

👉 Or speak with an Abstra specialist.