Let AI read the request. Keep the calculation in approved rules.

Suppose a customer emails: “Two of the boxes arrived damaged. Can you credit those and keep the discount we agreed last month?”

A finance assistant needs to identify the order, check what was damaged and find the agreement. Then comes a calculation. The final credit also needs approval from someone authorised to grant it.

These are different jobs. Putting them into one prompt makes it harder to see where an error entered.

A more useful design gives each job a visible boundary. AI can help interpret the message. Verified records supply the facts. Approved calculation rules produce the amount. A person approves the credit before it is issued.

Turn the message into a request you can check

The assistant can extract the customer, invoice reference, claimed quantity and reason for the credit. Keep the original message beside those fields so the reviewer can check what was inferred.

“Two boxes” remains unresolved if the order records individual units. The system needs the packaging quantity for that shipment. It should not borrow a conversion from another product because the descriptions look similar.

The same applies to “the discount we agreed”. That sentence reports a customer claim. Find the actual agreement and check its scope before applying it. A previous discount on a different order may not cover this one.

Missing or conflicting information should leave the request pending. A completed form with guessed fields makes the next stage look more certain than it is.

Calculate from verified inputs

Once the quantities and applicable terms are confirmed, pass them to a calculation routine. It should use approved rules for the specific transaction, including rounding and the order in which discounts or other adjustments apply.

For an illustrative check, assume a confirmed credit quantity of 20 units, a price of €15 per unit and an applicable discount of 10%. Before any tax or other adjustment, the amount is:

20 × €15 × 0.90 = €270.

The figures are hypothetical. The useful feature is that the calculation can be reproduced from named inputs and a known rule version.

Keep the result linked to those inputs. If someone changes the quantity or the agreement, recalculate and show the change. Do not ask a language model to invent the missing policy.

A fixed calculation can still be wrong. It may use an incorrect price, apply an outdated rule or contain a software defect. Test expected results with finance, including boundary cases, and preserve the version used for each decision.

Put approval before the action

The approver should see the original request, verified facts and calculation together, with unresolved issues visible. They should not need to reconstruct the whole chain in another spreadsheet.

Approval must refer to the amount and version being issued. If either changes, the previous approval should no longer authorise the transaction. When an approved credit is submitted to the finance system, check the resulting record before reporting completion.

Also plan for a timeout. An unanswered request to the finance system does not prove that nothing was created. Reconcile using a stable request reference before retrying, or the same credit could be issued twice.

Ask for the awkward demonstration

Before accepting a solution, test a request with an ambiguous unit, a discount that has expired and an invoice that already has a credit. Use a safe test environment and agree the expected outcome for each case first.

You should be able to see which step stopped and why. Also run the same verified inputs through the same calculation version twice. The result should match; that check alone does not establish that the underlying rule is correct.

Solve IT builds these connections around existing systems, with the checks and approval boundaries agreed for the workflow. A useful first scope might stop at a verified draft, leaving issuance in the finance team's current application until the rest has been tested.

Request a Strategy Session with the person who handles credits. Bring one request where “the usual discount” required a phone call.