Automating accounting and payroll back-office operations at enterprise scale

  • Category: Enterprise
  • Industry: Business Process Outsourcing / Financial Services
  • Service: Agentic AI / Enterprise platform engineering
  • Client: Nordic BPO provider

A Nordic business process outsourcing provider, delivering accounting and payroll services across thousands of customers, partnered with Symphony to turn document-heavy manual workflows into intelligent, enterprise-grade AI products. Symphony is building two production AI agents on a multi-tenant architecture designed from day one to scale across thousands of customers, with early performance gains of 7x faster document retrieval and 40x faster customer lookups.

Problem

The client's accounting and payroll operations relied on manual, document-heavy work that did not scale economically across a large customer base. Processing payroll and accounting documentation meant moving slowly through extraction, classification, and validation by hand, customer by customer. To grow without growing cost, the firm needed to convert traditional BPO workflows into automated, enterprise-grade products capable of handling thousands of customers and large document volumes, while keeping operational control in its own teams' hands.

Solution

Symphony is building two enterprise AI agents that take the deterministic, repetitive work out of accounting and payroll operations. A Payroll AI Agent automates payroll document extraction, classification, consolidation, and AI-assisted validation across payroll consulting workflows. A Voucher Handling Agent handles large-scale accounting document ingestion, intelligent classification, and AI-assisted extraction and consolidation. Both run on an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant architecture built to onboard thousands of customers, with continuous operational learning built in and human oversight retained at every step.

  • Payroll AI Agent automating extraction, classification, consolidation, and AI-assisted validation
  • Voucher Handling Agent for large-scale document ingestion, classification, and consolidation
  • Enterprise-grade, multi-tenant architecture designed to onboard thousands of customers
  • Continuous operational learning built into both agents
  • Queue-based scalable processing for large document volumes
  • Full observability and tracing across the platform
  • Human-in-the-loop control retained by the client's operational teams

Technology: Symphony moved the engagement from proof-of-concept agent implementations toward a production-grade architecture built for scale. Both agents run on Anthropic Haiku models hosted on AWS Bedrock, with AWS AgentCore as the agent runtime for enterprise-grade orchestration. The platform uses queue-based autoscaling, distributed caching, and a full observability stack, with the architecture designed for enterprise governance and large-customer onboarding from the start rather than retrofitted later.

Under the hood

Technical architecture

  • Anthropic Haiku models hosted on AWS Bedrock as the AI foundation
  • AWS AgentCore runtime for enterprise-grade agent orchestration
  • Queue-based scalable processing using SQS and Celery workers for autoscaling
  • Redis-based distributed caching shared across workers
  • Full observability and tracing stack (Langfuse, Grafana, Tempo, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry)
  • End-to-end tracing instrumented from frontend to backend
  • CI/CD automation, configuration management, rollback support, and deployment governance
  • Multi-tenant architecture designed for enterprise governance and thousands of customers

Business Impact

  • Converted manual, document-heavy BPO workflows into automated, enterprise-grade AI products
  • Built a multi-tenant platform able to onboard thousands of customers without proportional cost growth
  • Kept operational control with the client's teams while removing the repetitive work
  • Established the engineering foundation for a sustainable, client-owned operating model beyond the initial transformation
  • ~7x - Faster document retrieval, reduced from 14.8s to 2.1s
  • ~40x - Faster customer lookups, reduced from 24s to 0.6s
  • <10% - Long-term target for manual operational work
  • 2 Agents - Production AI agents on a multi-tenant platform

https://symphony.is/our-impact/case-studies/nordic-bpo-accounting-payroll-automation