Service manager agent, Account Manager sign-off workflow

Overview

Every month, each of Synextra's 20+ clients receives a report covering its support tickets, Azure spend, security, and project progress. Building those reports meant collecting data from five systems and the colleagues who held it. It took the account manager four days a month, before any analysis could start. Synextra is a Microsoft Azure specialist with 13 years of managing cloud environments for UK organisations, including law firms, conveyancers, and manufacturers. As a Synextra company, we designed this agent around its reporting process, built it, and now run it. It drafts every report. The account manager decides what goes out. As a Synextra company, Agents of Output used its agents here first, before offering them to other firms. It designed this agent around Synextra’s reporting process, built it, and still runs it. The agent drafts each client’s report from data in the tools the team already uses, and the account manager signs off every report before it reaches a client.

The Problem

Four days every month spent assembling client reports, not analysing them.

For a managed service provider, the month-end report is where a client sees what the service has done for them. Every monthly client meeting works from it, so it has to be accurate, consistent, and worth reading. As managed service providers come into regulation, a clear record of the work matters more, not less. If a report is late, thin, or wrong, the client notices before anyone else does. Each report drew on five separate systems, from support tickets and Azure costs to Secure Score, patching, and projects, and a different person on the team held the data for each. The account manager collected every section, chased anything missing, and built the deck, then did it again for the next client. The process ran on everyone else's diary. If someone was on leave or pulled onto urgent work, a section waited, and so did the report. Every manual copy was another chance for a figure to be wrong. The reports were never the problem. The time they took was. Across the year, the account manager spent 48 working days, or around 360 hours, building reports instead of working with clients. That's a cost no client sees and no invoice covers.

The Solution

One agent. One job. The client month-end report, built from source data and ready for review.

The team didn't need another reporting tool. It needed the reports done. The agent follows Synextra's own reporting process, from the systems it reads to the format each client receives. At month-end, it runs the same fixed sequence for every client, planning what the report needs to cover, gathering and analysing the data, then writing it up. It can't skip a step or add one of its own. If the writing step fails, it falls back to a version built straight from the source data. Every figure comes from the system that holds it. Nothing is retyped, so nothing is mistyped. It never invents content. Reading the full data set every month, the agent does the analysis nobody had time for when people built the reports by hand. It checks every figure against the month before, instantly, and flags what has changed. Each report now shows trends over time and recurring issues across a client's tickets, ready for the team to review. The team fixes causes, not just incidents. Changes go through Slack. Anyone on the team can tag the agent, say what needs changing, and get a revised version back, and the agent versions every edit, so there's a full audit trail. Every section comes from the person who owns it. The account manager signs off every report before it reaches a client. We run the agent and check every report it produces. It doesn't go on leave or get pulled onto other work, so every report is ready at month-end. It works in Slack, alongside the systems the team already uses. The agent fits the team, not the other way round.

The Impact

From building reports to reviewing them.

Month-end reporting now takes half a day to check, not four days to build. That's more than 300 hours a year back for client work. Five people update their own sections directly. Nobody chases. Nobody collates. The time that used to go into proving the service now goes into improving it. The reports are more reliable too. Every figure comes straight from source and is checked against the month before, so a mistyped figure or a missed change doesn't reach the client. Leave and busy weeks no longer hold a report up. Every client gets theirs on time, every month. For clients, the difference is in the meeting itself. The agent surfaces what has changed and the patterns behind it, and Synextra's experts decide what it means for each client. The meeting becomes consultancy, not a run-through of statistics. Same process, every report. It also changes what growth costs. Reporting no longer grows with the client list. The service can. The question to ask of any agent is what happens when it gets something wrong. Here, nothing reaches a client unchecked, and nothing changes without a record.