RPA in Accounting and Finance: 20 Innovative Use Cases

With little- and no-code solutions, this RPA platform provides you with everything that you need to mind the gap. The most common scenarios for digital procedure overhauls in business today include automating the complete cycle of processes such as procure to pay, record to report and order to cash. Improvements of 50% to 90% are possible—but that still leaves plenty of room for human error and tedious manual processes. Finance teams still spend a lot of time bookkeeping and analyzing historical performance. Despite automating basic accounting tasks, they remain markedly invested in preparing and consolidating data for day-to-day reporting.

Complicated legacy systems are not always flexible in integrating other necessary systems or introducing new processes. Robots can enhance compliance and reduce risks by performing tasks in a standardized manner, free of any variation. Where a human might skip a step or be inconsistent in how they process transactions, software robots perform tasks repeatedly. Robotic Process Automation is employing smart software robots (bots) that identify, and mimic human interactions with core legacy systems, along with web and other desktop applications to execute processes.

Five ways to use RPA in finance

“A good candidate [for RPA] is a task that is a bottleneck in a larger process that may take hours of manual work,” Gannon said. “Many are now finding that RPA provides the means for organizations to finally address and solve these problems,” he said. The first challenge was how to get data into these systems and the second was how to close their financials at month’s end, Dean said. Let’s look at a few of the most common areas in which additional RPA can be an excellent match for accounting and finance. We help your organization save time, increase productivity and accelerate growth.

RPA can streamline process automation in finance and accounting by automating tasks such as invoice processing, expense reporting, reconciliation, tax compliance, financial reporting, and audit preparation. RPA can improve the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of these processes, as well as reduce the risk of fraud, compliance issues, and human errors. RPA can also free up finance and accounting staff from mundane tasks and enable them to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Inventory Management 2.0 AI & RPA Benefits for Supply Chain Network

Both activities involve gathering data inputs, formatting the data and aggregating them in an easy-to-understand format for all stakeholders. RPA in financial planning allows businesses to provide forecasts at a faster rate and constantly have an updated view of the latest capital expenditures, investments, and financial statements. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is bots executing repetitive business tasks across applications and system. In this article, we are specifically focusing on RPA use cases in finance, such as automated recording keeping and finance control.

Gone are when businesses had to bear high labour costs when demand/workload spikes. In today’s time, with insightful guidance and a reliable RPA service provider, you can automate rpa in finance and accounting F&A processes in a few weeks. The financial and accounting industry involves many transactional processes that follow the same pattern – mundane, repetitive, and time-sensitive.

Robotic process automation in banking: use cases, benefits, and challenges

RPA translates benefits to these F&A institutions for it’s an automation tool that not only accelerates the process but also ensures there are no clerical errors. Process automation establishes and sustains consistency in execution, which translates into fewer process issues to deal with. Moreover, well-designed RPA systems make it straightforward to make adjustments to processes and how they are performed. Our global network includes leading consulting and technology organizations that enable us to deliver exceptional solutions to our shared clients. Accelerate dispute resolution with automated workflows and maintain customer relationships with operational reporting. Unlock full control and visibility of disputes and provide better insight into how they impact KPIs, such as DSO and aged debt provisions.

Therefore, robotic process automation can automate invoice payments’ creation, transmission, and tracking, significantly reducing late payments. With its accounting and procurement divisions, finance satisfies both of these criteria. It is well-known as a business function for repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as data entry, reporting, cross-checking, and record-keeping, which is ideal for RPA bots. RPA is an effective solution in many areas of finance and accounting since it reduces processing times, minimizes entry errors, and lowers costs. Although auditing automation should be handled at a slower pace to assess effectiveness, the outcome can be extremely valuable.

Integration with existing systems

IA offers the clearest path towards a true digital transformation for businesses. As a leader in this space, Kofax occupies the perfect position to support businesses driving transformative efforts with investments in automation. Learn more about our intelligent automation platform and these opportunities today.

• Over half of accounting firms worldwide have implemented RPA in their operations, and that’s expected to rise to over three-quarters within the next year or so.
• A Deloitte survey found robotic process automation (RPA) in accounting improved customer compliance 92 percent, accuracy 90 percent, productivity 85 percent, and reduced costs 59 percent.
• All these benefits above highlight some of the key advantages that Robotic Process Automation brings to the finance and accounting sector.
• RPA came to join other technological projects aiming at making our collaborators’ work easier and enabling us to offer increasingly better services to our clients.
• The financial institution faced a common problem among banks – employees spent too much time on daily reporting, preventing them from performing more important and cognitively-demanding tasks.
• RPA consists of software robots, or bots, that represent a pattern of reusable automations for tasks and processes.

Too often, the ROI of RPA is compared to the reduction of FTE hours on repetitive tasks and close efficiency. Instead, it should be assessed on the reduction of negative impacts (like preventing mistakes and the knock-on effects of correcting that mistake). It’s the little things that distract employees from the core business, and cost the company uncounted hours. Even the large company audits you do essentially involve the same sort of tasks.

Improve your efficiency with RPA

RPA bots can handle most activities in tasks such as payroll, record keeping, reporting, and account payable and receivable. Leverage this data to optimize customers’ credits, track customers’ orders and invoices, and process payments. The digital economy is changing dynamically, and in these radical shifts, Robotic Process Automation has gained quite some traction. So much so that automation technology is piercing through all the industries, and is gradually becoming an integral part of the growth strategy of businesses. It also enables companies to centralize documentation, transactional details, intercompany agreements, and pricing while acting as an ERP-agnostic connective tissue between different entities.

When data varies too much from what’s expected, or the robot grades its own confidence on the lower end of the scale, it can flag an invoice for manual user review. Outside of these cases, you can dramatically reduce the number of “touches” each invoice requires. Our prebuilt automations and ready-to-go connectors can give you a head start on a more innovative future for finance and accounting. Managing cash is essential to the financial health of your company, and digitizing the processes within it can help it run more smoothly. Effective administration requires tracking and analyzing cashflow, forecasting, and implementing techniques and strategies.

Non-disruptive implementation

Introduce automation and transform your processes into smarter ones to help establish your scope, helping mitigate risk. Deliver a wide range of deep analytics and high-powered reporting to both optimize and automate a very important aspect of your business. By optimizing your office for data-driven decision making, you’ll be running smoothly, giving your team back time for the work that matters most. Gartner for Finance provides insights, advice and tools to help finance leaders make the right decisions to drive business results.