Controller, fintech Series B

We sat down with Priya Shankar to ask what she's learned in the first six months of running Maya in production.

What was the first thing you put on Maya?
Inbound invoice triage. We were getting maybe 800 invoices a month, half through email, half through portals, and AP was spending all day just sorting them. Maya took that off the plate within ten days.

What surprised you?
How quickly the team's job changed. They went from data entry to spending real time on the exceptions. Better work, less of it. The first month I was worried they'd push back. Nobody did.

Anything you'd do differently?
I'd have started with a smaller scope. We tried to do AP and recs at the same time. AP was easy because the inputs were clean. Recs were a mess because our chart of accounts had drift. We went back, fixed the COA, then turned recs on. Cost us two weeks.

What do you tell other controllers asking about agents?
Pick one workflow. Get it boring. Then pick the next one. The teams I see struggling are the ones trying to transform AP, procurement, and close all at once. That's not an agent problem. That's a scope problem.

A moment that made you trust the system?
Maya flagged twelve invoices overnight that would have hit us at month-end. Auto-flagged them, ran the dispute against the PO, queued them for review. I came in Monday and a third of my month-end risk was already sorted. That's when I stopped checking it every day.