He Recorded 23 Bots. Then He Got Promoted.
For two years Arjun did ten hours a day in finance ops. Then he found something. Four months later, 23 bots were running. He was not the same person anymore.
For two years, Arjun started every Monday at 7:30 in the morning.
Not because anyone asked him to. Because by 7:31, the GST portal was already pulling at him, and if he did not start before anyone else arrived, the day collapsed before lunch.
Bank reconciliation first. Then the GSTN portal. Vendor matching. TDS entries. MIS report to five people who needed it before 10 AM. By the time the office filled up, he had already been at it for two hours and was maybe halfway through.
He did this five days a week. Sometimes six.
Ten hours was a normal day. Twelve was not unusual during quarter close. He was not bad at his job. He was very good at his job. Which is partly why the job never got smaller.
"I knew every step by heart. I could do the reconciliation with my eyes half closed. That was the problem."
The List
He had a list. He had always had a list.
Fourteen things he wanted to automate if anyone ever gave him time or tools or both. He kept it in a notes file called "someday.txt" because that was the most honest thing he could call it. He had not opened it in four months.
He heard about Guerrilla Bots from someone on a finance ops forum. Someone had recorded their payables workflow in a browser extension and was describing the steps like it was nothing. Like it was obvious. Like of course this is how it works.
Arjun read the comment three times.
The following Tuesday, he recorded his first bot.
It was the GSTN reconciliation. The one he had been doing every single Monday for two years. He opened the portal, started the recording, and just did the work. Forty minutes of doing the work he already knew how to do. The same clicks, the same sequence, the same logic his hands already knew without him having to think.
By Friday, the bot ran it in six minutes.
He sat looking at the output for a long time.
Then he opened someday.txt.
23 Bots in 4 Months
Not all at once. One or two a week, on days when he could carve out an hour.
Each one was something he had been doing by hand for months or years. The vendor matching that took ninety minutes every Thursday. The bank statement import that required three portals and a specific sequence that only he knew. The monthly TDS calculation he rebuilt from scratch every time because the template kept breaking. The MIS report that went to five people every Monday morning, the one he used to build by hand in an hour and a half.
He named them. Bot 4 was Vendor Match. Bot 9 was TDS Monthly. Bot 14 was the one that made him smile when it ran because it had taken him an hour every single Friday for a year and now it took four minutes while he was in standup.
By the time he recorded Bot 23, something had shifted.
23 bots. 8.4 hours saved every week. He did not know what to do with the time at first.
What He Did With 8 Hours
The first week, he finished at 6 PM and felt guilty about it.
The second week, he pulled up a financial modelling course he had bookmarked eight months ago and never opened.
By the fourth week, he was showing up to the weekly ops review with ideas. Not status updates. Ideas. Things he had been watching for two years but never had time to think about. Patterns in the vendor data. A reconciliation gap that had been showing up every third month for a year but nobody had time to trace.
His manager noticed.
Not because Arjun said anything about the bots. Because the work was done, the quality was higher, and he was available. In a team where everyone was buried, availability was a thing people noticed.
Three months later, Arjun was a team lead.
The Handover
The first thing he did was not take a bigger desk.
He sat with three people on his team, one afternoon each, and watched them record their first bot. He did not give them his bots. He gave them the approach. He sat beside them and let them do the recording themselves because the point was that they knew their own work better than he ever would.
Two of them were skeptical. One of them recorded her first bot in forty minutes and then said, quietly, "that's it?"
That's it.
Within a month, the team had 31 bots running across five people.
He was not the bottleneck anymore. He was the architect.
Monday Mornings Now
The GSTN reconciliation runs at 7:00 AM.
The MIS goes out at 9:00, already formatted, already sent. The vendor matching runs Thursday night. The TDS calculation runs itself the last Friday of every month.
Arjun knows this without checking, the same way you know a light is on because the room is bright.
He spends Monday mornings looking at the next list. The new list. The one with twelve things the team is still doing manually, processes that are still eating hours that should take minutes.
He already knows which one he is recording first.
Every finance ops team has someone like Arjun. Someone who knows every process cold, who could do it in their sleep, who has a someday.txt they have not opened in months.
The question is whether they have a tool that takes that knowledge seriously.
Written by
Pranav Neeli
12 years enterprise RPA — developer to architect to manager. Worked at Accenture, EY, Fossil, Alcon, HP. Now building Guerrilla Bots to fix the last mile.