Pen trace: invoices ingested, parsed and posted per hour. Steady wander is normal; cliffs are not.
MISSION OPERATIONS FOR THE BACK OFFICE
Your operations, monitored like a flight.
Flight Deck builds the automation that runs your intake, routing and billing — then sits console on it around the clock. Telemetry on every workflow. A human on every anomaly. The pager on the nightstand is ours, not yours.
PANEL 01 · MISSION BOARD
In flight right now
Three of the workflows we fly, on chart recorders. The traces below simulate a typical Tuesday on a client’s board — the lamps, the queue swings, the 04:00 batch. Real boards are private; the shape of the work is not.
Pen trace: items waiting for a routing decision. Builds, then drains. If it only builds, a lamp lights.
Pen trace: work the automation refused to guess at. We keep this channel proudly non-zero.
PANEL 02 · FLIGHT PLANS
Every workflow flies a written plan
A flight plan is drafted before we build, rehearsed before we launch, and amended after every anomaly. You own the document. These are the three we fly most.
Intake & classification
Email, EDI, portals, the occasional fax. Everything that arrives gets read, understood and routed — or honestly refused.
- T+00:00 Ingest from every inbound channel
- T+00:04 Parse & extract — line items, parties, totals
- T+00:09 Classify, then route to the owning system
- T+00:12 Confirm receipt back to the sender
ABORT MODE Anything unreadable queues to a human inbox with full context. Nothing is dropped, ever.
Typical: four minutes from inbox to routed, around the clock.
Billing & reconciliation
Invoices matched against orders and receipts, mismatches chased with the vendor, clean entries posted to the ledger.
- T+00:00 Three-way match — invoice · PO · receipt
- T+00:02 Mismatch? Draft the vendor query, cite the delta
- T+00:05 Post matched entries with a full audit path
- T+24:00 Chase unanswered queries on a fixed cadence
ABORT MODE Any doubt about money falls back to a review queue with reason codes. The system never guesses at a payment.
Typical: 92–98% touchless match rate by month three.
Reporting & handoff
The Monday spreadsheet, retired. Rollups build themselves nightly; exceptions arrive with everything a human needs to decide.
- T+00:00 Nightly rollup across every flown workflow
- T+00:10 Exceptions packaged — history, docs, our read
- T+07:00 Morning summary lands before your coffee does
- WEEKLY Ops debrief in plain English, numbers attached
ABORT MODE Raw exports of every dataset, always one click away. Your data is never hostage to our dashboards.
Typical: reporting labor cut to near zero; decisions made same-day.
PANEL 03 · FLIGHT RULES
Written in advance, like all good rules
Mission control wrote its rules before the mission, so nobody improvised at the worst moment. Ours are below, unabridged.
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RULE 1
We page ourselves first.
An anomaly wakes a controller at Flight Deck. It wakes you only if a decision genuinely needs an owner — and then it arrives as one clear question, not a stack trace.
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RULE 2
Every automation has an abort mode.
A documented manual fallback, drilled quarterly with your team. Systems fail; missions shouldn’t. If the abort mode has never been rehearsed, it isn’t one.
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RULE 3
If it touched money, a human can trace it.
Every posted transaction carries its full path — source document, decision, timestamps, who or what approved it. Auditors have hugged us.
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RULE 4
No launches on Friday afternoon.
Boring, and correct. Changes ship early in the week, watched live on the board, with the previous version one switch away.
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RULE 5
Anomalies are reported within 24 hours.
What happened, what it cost, what we changed — in plain English, signed by the controller who handled it. Silence is the only failure we don’t tolerate.
PANEL 04 · POST-FLIGHT DEBRIEFS
What flew, what failed, what changed
We write debriefs the way flight control did — anomalies included, because a case study with zero anomalies is a press release. Names withheld; numbers real.
Freight forwarder, 60 staff
Mission: invoice intake and three-way match across 40+ carriers. Duration: 14 months, ongoing.
- Invoices / month
- 9,400
- Exception rate
- 11.2% → 1.8%
- Missed SLAs, last 2 qtrs
- 0
ANOMALIES · 2 A carrier portal changed its login flow — 43 minutes degraded, abort mode held, nothing lost. One vendor sent the same invoice 31 times; the DUPE INV rule caught every copy. Double-paid: $0.
DTC retailer, ~$40M GMV
Mission: order exceptions and carrier claims. Duration: 11 months, ongoing.
- Tickets auto-resolved
- 71%
- Claims recovered / month
- +$18K
- First response
- 6 hrs → 11 min
ANOMALIES · 1 A courier API rate-limited us at the Black Friday peak. QUEUE HI lit at 21:40, the backlog drained by 04:10, and no customer waited past morning. We now pre-negotiate peak quotas in October.
Specialty clinic group, 11 sites
Mission: referral intake and scheduling prep. Duration: 9 months, ongoing. Yes, faxes.
- Faxed referrals digitized
- 100%
- Prep time per referral
- 22 min → 3 min
- No-show rate
- −19%
ANOMALIES · 0 No lamps lit in the first 90 days. One rule amended by a human: we lowered the handwriting-confidence threshold, because a doctor’s 7 is everyone else’s 1.
PANEL 05 · MISSION TIERS
Named by how far you’re going
No “contact us” fog. These are the real numbers, and every tier includes the same rules, the same telemetry, the same pager discipline.
Suborbital
$4,500/mo
Up and down. One workflow, flown properly — proof before commitment.
- One workflow, built + flight-planned in 3 weeks
- Console staffed 07:00–19:00 ET
- Weekly written debrief
- Abort-mode drill at day 30
Orbital
$9,800/mo
Sustained operations. Most clients live here, most never leave.
- Up to four workflows in continuous flight
- 24/7 console & paging — ours, per Rule 1
- Monthly debrief, quarterly abort drills
- A telemetry board your team can read
Deep space
from $22,000/mo
The whole back office on the board, with a crew that knows your callsign.
- Unlimited workflows, dedicated flight director
- Custom telemetry channels & lamps
- On-site readiness review twice a year
- We train your people to sit console with us
All tiers: 60 days’ notice, no lock-in, and you keep every runbook and flight plan we write. They’re yours; we just fly them.
PANEL 06 · CALLSIGNS
Four consoles, actually staffed
Small by design. Everyone here has run operations somewhere that broke at 3 a.m. — which is why it doesn’t anymore.
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FLIGHT
Mara Osei
Flight director & founder. Ran ops at a 300-truck freight company. Decides, then documents the decision.
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EECOM
Priya Raghavan
Systems. Builds every automation and its abort mode. Distrusts anything she hasn’t personally watched fail.
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CAPCOM
Jonah Weiss
The voice. The only person who calls you. Translates a night of telemetry into two paragraphs of English.
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SURGEON
Ana Reyes
On-call. Carries the pager and wakes first, so nobody else has to. Monitors the humans, not just the machines.
PANEL 07 · GO / NO-GO FOR READINESS REVIEW
Poll your stations. Arm the switch.
A readiness review is 45 minutes: your operations on a whiteboard, our honest read on what should fly first — and what shouldn’t fly at all. Free, and occasionally we talk ourselves out of the job.
FLIGHT, GO / NO-GO FOR REVIEW —
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INTAKE Email, orders or referrals arrive somewhere, somehow
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ROUTING A person decides, daily, where each piece of work goes
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BILLING Money moves on paper trails somebody has to chase
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REPORTING Somebody rebuilds the Monday spreadsheet every Monday
STATIONS POLLED · 0 / 4
ARMED
Poll all four stations, raise the guard, then flip the switch.
Rather skip the ceremony? flight@flightdeckops.com works too.