A global media technology company's finance operations team replaced email queues, spreadsheet rekeying, and scheduled RPA runs with Zingtree automation.

The challenge: Unstructured requests buried finance operations in manual triage and rework

Many of the company's internal and external finance workflows started life as free-text emails, Slack messages, and support tickets. None of them could go straight into a finance system. Someone on the team had to turn each request into something a system would accept, and that manual middle step sat in front of nearly every transaction.

• Each request had to be read, categorized, prioritized, and routed, with details looked up in a separate system, before any finance work began.
• Customers often sent incomplete finance and procurement details, so internal teams chased corrections back and forth over email.
• Data moved between systems through spreadsheets and copy-paste, or waited for a daily or weekly RPA run to write it back.

"So many of our workflow inputs were unstructured. All of those required someone to read it, make sense of the request, and frequently gather missing information. It was a very long, convoluted process." – Finance automation lead, global media technology company

Implementation: Finance owns the build, and IT sets up the connections once

The finance team needed a way to push and pull data with back-end finance systems in real time, without queuing every request behind IT. Low-code ownership by the business was the deciding requirement.

• IT set up the initial connections to back-end systems; a three-person finance automation team now builds, deploys, and maintains the workflows itself.
• Technology, audit, and marketing teams are looped in for lightweight reviews.
• Small updates take 30 minutes to a couple of hours, mid-sized workflows go live in one to two weeks, and workflows connected to back-end systems ship in three to five weeks.

"It was essentially the make-or-break requirement we had for a solution. We knew technology wouldn't be able to deliver at the rate we needed to meet our objectives." – Finance automation lead

Solution: Validated data goes straight into systems of record while the session is still open

Zingtree now sits where finance requests start and carries each one through to the system of record. A sales or service rep launches a workflow in a few clicks, Zingtree asks for only what that case needs, checks it, and completes the back-end transaction in the same session.

• Front-end validation catches errors before any data reaches a back-end system.
• Data is pushed to and pulled from systems of record, including Salesforce, inside the same session, with no RPA run to wait for.
• The team writes its own custom logic using Co-Author, so the middleware layer lives inside Zingtree instead of a separate RPA bot, even though no one on the team is a developer.

"It wows our internal customers that a non-technology team like ourselves can deliver such a sophisticated, end-to-end solution. We're not software developers, but the gap between what traditional technology resources can do and what we can deliver has really narrowed." – Finance automation lead

Results: Back-office transactions close in one session, without the rework loop

The team's finance automation lead estimates the new flows compress transactions that used to take hours, days, or sometimes weeks into a single user session. Just as important is what changed for the people doing the work.

• Sales and service no longer chase customers for finance and procurement details up front; each workflow collects only what the case requires.
• Once data is validated, back-end transactions run automatically, so most sessions complete in real time instead of waiting on a daily or weekly RPA run.
• For the cases the flows cover, downstream corrections, callbacks, and follow-up tickets are gone.

"There's so much work that's just churning through a backlog of support tickets and emails. Employees end up effectively being internal search engines. With Zingtree's back-end Connectors, that passive, reactive middle person becomes a proactive and engaged agent of change." – Finance automation lead

Looking ahead: More finance flows in the queue, and less RPA to maintain

With the first connected flows live, internal demand is climbing as other teams see what a business-owned back-office workflow can do.

• The finance automation lead expects a dedicated project queue for connected flows to form quickly.
• The team is already revisiting older flows to redesign them around real-time back-end integration.
• RPA used to scrape data from Zingtree front ends, run middleware processing, and write it back to systems of record; Zingtree now handles all three in one layer.

"With Zingtree's Connectors, that's going to cannibalize a lot of the RPA we might have used, and it will likely even replace RPA in existing flows." – Finance automation lead

About Zingtree

Zingtree is an agentic governance and orchestration platform that enables enterprises in complex, regulated industries to resolve high-stakes customer support issues while maintaining oversight of AI agents, managing costs and latency, and meeting compliance requirements.