Answering "which account?" for a mining group, in two languages and with the evidence attached
A conversational assistant that tells finance and operations staff which account to post against, in either language, with the evidence behind every suggestion.
Executive summary
A resources group ran around ten operating entities on one shared chart of accounts, and the errors that reached month-end close almost never came from the ledger itself. They came from the moment someone had to pick an account, in an ERP that accepts a wrong code as readily as a right one. We built a multi-agent assistant that reads the question in Indonesian or English, retrieves candidate accounts across both the account master and the group's own policy documents, states how confident it is, and shows the evidence a suggestion rests on. When it cannot resolve a case it says so and routes it to a person rather than guessing.
Business context
The group runs around ten operating entities across mining, hauling and support services, all posting against one shared chart of accounts. That shared chart is what makes consolidated reporting possible, and it is also what makes the daily work hard: an account written for the group as a whole has to be applied by somebody at a pit, a workshop or a procurement desk, whose vocabulary is nothing like the account name. Two constraints shaped everything that followed. First, the assistant sits in front of an accounting decision, so being quietly wrong is far worse than being loudly unhelpful, and every answer has to carry the evidence it rests on. Second, the people asking write in a working mix of Indonesian and English, often inside one sentence, while the account master they are searching is written in a third register again. Retrieval had to cross that gap rather than assume it away.
The challenge
The same account meant slightly different things at different sites, and the people posting transactions were rarely the people who wrote the policy. A pit supervisor recording fuel usage and a procurement officer recording a fuel purchase are looking at the same word and need two different accounts, and nothing in the ERP tells them so. A wrong code is accepted silently, surfaces weeks later during close, and costs more to unwind than it ever cost to enter. Guidance did exist, spread across spreadsheets, policy documents and the memory of a handful of senior staff, and none of it was available at the moment the decision was made.