Every civilization organized itself around a contained fire.

Hearth Advisory

Scroll — the fire is below

c. 400,000 BCE — the first kept fire

A fire in the open draws a circle of people around it.

Warmth first, then the rest of it: the food, the talking, the deciding. Whatever else the fire was for, it was the reason everyone was in the same place.

c. 1200 BCE — fire, given a shape to work in

Enclosed and fed on purpose, the same fire became a trade.

The forge did not make the fire hotter by wishing. It gave the fire walls, a draught, and a person whose whole job was to watch it.

c. 1300 CE — the chimney; fire made safe to live beside

The hearth was never the flame. It was the architecture that kept it.

Stone floor, drawn flue, a wall between the fire and everything it could take. Nothing about the fire changed. What changed was what held it.

AI is the new fire. The work now is the same work: build the thing that holds it.

Hearth Advisory — AI modernization

What we do

AI modernization for oilfield, service, and fintech companies still running critical workflows by hand.

We start where the work actually happens — the spreadsheet everyone edits, the approval that waits on one inbox — and modernize the loop around your analysts, not instead of them.

The situation

Critical workflows still run by hand.

Not because anyone chose it. The system was built for a smaller company, the person who understood it left, and the workaround became the process. Everything below is work we have watched competent teams do manually, every month, on a deadline.

Credit memos

Written from scratch, every time

An analyst pulls financials, re-types the same spreads, and rebuilds a memo that looks like the last forty. The judgment takes an hour. The assembly takes a day.

Field tickets

Keyed in twice, sometimes three times

Written in the field, photographed, emailed, re-entered into the billing system. Every hop is a place a number can change without anyone noticing.

JIB

Reconciled against a PDF

Joint interest billing arrives as statements that do not match the ledger. Someone opens both, scrolls, and marks the differences by eye before the close.

Approval chains

Waiting on one person's inbox

Limits, exceptions, releases — real decisions that need a human. But the queue lives in email, so nobody can see what is stuck or how long it has been stuck.

The method

Map it, modernize it, keep people in it.

Map the workflow

We sit with the people doing the work and trace one process end to end — every hand-off, every re-key, every wait. Nothing is proposed until the map is right.

Modernize the loop

Automate the assembly, not the judgment. Documents parsed, data reconciled, drafts prepared — so the analyst opens something finished enough to argue with.

Keep humans in it

Every consequential step keeps a named reviewer, a visible queue, and a record of what changed. Your analysts, faster and surer.

What an audit surfaces

Three findings, written plainly.

An audit ends in a short document: where the time goes, what can be modernized in ninety days, and what should be left alone. The examples below illustrate the format — they are not client results.

Example only

The memo is mostly assembly

Of the average credit memo, most of the elapsed time is gathering and formatting. The analytical section is written last, tired, and quickly.

● assembly 6.5 hrs · judgment 1.2 hrs

Illustrative figures. Not a client result.

Example only

The same number is entered four times

A field ticket quantity travels from paper to photo to email to the billing system. Each re-entry is unverified, and the mismatch is found at invoicing.

● 4 entry points · 1 reconciliation, at month end

Illustrative figures. Not a client result.

Example only

Nobody can see the queue

Approvals sit in individual inboxes. There is no shared view of what is waiting, who owns it, or how long it has been there — so escalation is a guess.

● 3 approvers · no shared queue · age unknown

Illustrative figures. Not a client result.

Start here

The AI Modernization Audit.

Two weeks. One workflow, mapped end to end. You get the map, a ninety-day modernization plan, and a plain answer about what is worth doing. If the answer is “less than you think,” we will say so.

Book an audit Or write plainly about the workflow that keeps you up at month end.

Hearth Advisory is a credit and operations practice in Houston. The background is portfolio risk — writing the memos, chasing the exceptions, closing the month — which is why the work starts with the workflow and not with the technology.

We take a small number of engagements at a time, we say when something should not be automated, and we leave documentation your team can run without us.