Saving 10% of an Employee's Week With Two AI-Delegated Tasks

Definitive Valuations is Alabama and Tennessee’s premier residential real estate appraisal firm. Their accounts receivable team lives in Gmail and Monday.com, and for a long time every payment line crossed that gap by hand.

The Challenge

A single remittance email at Definitive Valuations might be three lines of typed text. It might be a PDF with one entry or a dozen. It might be one ACH deposit covering twelve different properties, with a “batch total” line that has nothing to do with what any one of those properties actually owes.

Someone had to open every one of them, parse it out, find the matching order among hundreds of rows on a Monday.com tracker, and update it by hand.

Plenty of those emails were perfectly clear once someone read them. They still cost the same open-decode-search-type cycle as the difficult ones, and there were only so many hours in the day to spend on them.

Our Approach

Instead of building an “automation,” we focused on creating a junior employee: clear instructions and a decision tree, updates posted in Monday.com when work is done, and a way to raise its hand when it gets stuck.

That meant one question governing every payment line: am I sure enough to act, or does this need human judgment?

How it answers determines how much of the reviewer’s attention the payment costs.

How It Works Day to Day

The emails arrive. Payments come in the same way they always have. The system reads them and writes to the same Monday.com board the team already lives in.

The clear matches are ready when the reviewer opens the board. They sit at “To Approve” with the payment details filled in and a link back to the email they came from. The reviewer’s job on these is a confirmation, which takes seconds.

Uncertainty is flagged to a shortlist. Two orders for the same address, an amount that doesn’t quite fit: the item shows every candidate it considered and what it saw in the email. The reviewer picks the right one and approves, or handles it manually.

It communicates the way a coworker would, in the tools the team already uses. Every item it touches gets a comment in Monday.com explaining the work: what it matched, what it saw in the email, or exactly what stopped it. Handoffs happen through the board’s own statuses, so “AI Needs Help” sits in the same queue as any other task waiting on a person. And when a payment has nothing on the board to post it against, it emails the team to say so rather than leaving something unfiled.

Approval stays human. Nothing reaches “Approved” without a person putting it there. What changed is where that person spends the day: on the payments that need a judgment call, rather than on the search that used to precede every single one of them.

Implementation Process

We started with the accounts receivable workflow as it actually existed at Definitive Valuations.

The matching logic was built against real cases. Every payment line runs the same decision path, and any step that fails to resolve to exactly one confident answer stops the line and flags it.

The review statuses live on the team’s existing board; nobody had to adopt a new system to make this work.

The AI team member came online in watch mode. Every batch went to the reviewer for approval before anything went out, the same way you’d loop in a new hire before their first client-facing send. Direct sends of the past-due payment reminders started only after that track record held up.

Positive Outcomes

• The balances the team works from are current. Payments get matched and staged the same day they arrive. Past-due follow-up goes to accounts that are genuinely past due, and the team can answer “has this one paid yet” by looking at the board.
• Collections work happens automatically. Past-due reminders go out on their own now, with cancelled, zero-balance, and orders set “do-not-email” skipped. Outstanding payment follow-up stops depending on whether anyone had a free hour for it this week.
• Order volume can grow without another set of hands in the inbox. The ceiling used to be how many emails one person could open, decode, and search in a day. That ceiling is much higher now.
• Any posted payment can be traced in one click. The source email is linked on the item and a person’s approval is on the record. When a lender, an auditor, or a client asks why a property shows paid, the answer takes seconds to produce.
• Roughly 3.5 hours per week back. About 10% of one employee’s time. Work that used to pile up for a once-or-twice-a-week batch now gets handled daily, in small chunks.

In Their Words

This week, we sent 32 payments through to see what we’d really get back, and only two needed me. When something’s uncertain, it tells me what it needs help with, and I can figure it out pretty quickly.

 — Stacy Nesselrotte, Definitive Valuations

From the very beginning, Mitch took the time to really listen and understand our workflow and what we were trying to accomplish. He explained everything in a way that was easy to understand, even for those of us without a technical background. Throughout the project, he was professional, responsive, and completed everything in a timely manner.

 — Natalie Jay, Chief Appraiser/VP/Owner, Definitive Valuations

Why This Worked

Nobody wants more systems, and almost nobody wants more tech. We want reliable coworkers, and that’s the model this was built around.

An automation that quietly guesses wrong costs far more, in time and in trust, than one that stops and asks.

The Takeaway

Tech is the word we use for things that sometimes don’t work. Good AI feels like a coworker, not a technology.

If your colleague can only tell you when they succeeded, the failures blindside you.

The design decisions that carry the most weight are how this new colleague ties into your existing systems and works alongside your team. Get that part right and the system stops being something you have to audit. It becomes something you can collaborate with.

Definitive Valuations built that, and every dollar still gets a human sign-off.