Exploring IA and RPA Use Cases in Finance & Accounting

These non-value-added workflows add cost, errors, complexity, and audit concerns throughout A&F operations. RPA helps streamline processes and bring in more process efficiency, thereby reducing costs and improving compliance. It is due to these benefits that 59% of Finance rpa use cases in accounting & Accounting leaders believe RPA will make their business more competitive over the next two years, according to the 2019 Economist Survey “Advance of Automation”. Each invoice is validated against the defined data fields to extract and store the information.

A customized solution like RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) enables customers to avoid confusing prices ahead in RPA adoption. RPA pricing model precisely eliminates the air of uncertainty and confusion and enables financial organizations to adopt RPA in accounting with no additional costs and holes in their pocket. Digital workers can help with financial reporting by automating the process of data collection, analysis and report generation.

‍10. Expense management

Identify all the manual processes that your organization is spending time on. Next, list all the repetitive, manual & high-volume functions based on their complexity. Leverage this data to optimize customers’ credits, track orders and invoices, and process payments. Account Payable is a critical part of the day-to-day functions of any financial institution.

RPA bots can scan through contracts and purchase orders and use natural language processing to extract key information such as discounts, rebates and penalty clauses. The bots can then compare this information with information from HPE’s ERP systems on the actuals to identify the gaps and highlight discrepancies. As an example, HPE’s contract compliance team is using RPA to help automate many processes involved in ensuring adherence to vendor contracts. Dean has worked on several projects to automate this process quickly and efficiently by scanning the data, finding issues and bringing them to a team member’s attention for review.

Financial Close and Reporting

According to the annual work index, employees spend 58% of their day doing «work about work,»… Before deploying RPA on a broad scale, you may want to start with a minor testing procedure. With the test, you would be able to realize if your goals and processes are aligned.

By implementing RPA, businesses can free up to 30% of a full-time employee’s overall time and save 25,000 hours of rework for an accounting team of 40, according to Gartner research. IBM is building the industry’s most comprehensive suite of AI-powered Automation capabilities. With IBM Robotic Process Automation, financial services firms like Credigy Solutions can automate more business and IT tasks at scale with the ease and speed of traditional RPA. Software robots, or bots, can act on AI insights to complete tasks with no lag time and accelerate digital transformation. HPE’s accounts payable team processes a considerable volume of paper invoices each month and is responsible for recording vendor invoices for subsequent payment processing.

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Leverage real-time visual reporting tools, such as TruBI, to visualize the data for Spend Analytics and Vendor Rating, and arrive at important decisions in the CFO office. With RPA, your finance and accounting department can ensure compliance with tax requirements by leveraging a more efficient approach. Improve invoice processing accuracy by using automation combined with AI (UiPath Document Understanding) to reengineer workflows, digitizing invoice collection, validation, and storage. Our robots extract, interpret, and process data for you, even from PDFs, images, handwriting, and scans, reducing turnaround times and freeing up time spent on highly manual tasks. Automate your activities, including purchasing and receiving goods and services, and integrate them with accounts payable to complete the purchase-to-pay cycle.

By streamlining invoice processing with intelligent automation, organizations can reduce errors and improve cost savings, cycle time and compliance. A safe way to monitor financial performance is to track profit and loss on a daily basis. RPA can take this task off your shoulders and generate immaculate reports in real time. Such intelligent automation will make your business processes more transparent and ensure financial forecasting accuracy. To limit the risks of regulatory fines and reputational damage, financial institutions can use RPA to strengthen governance of financial processes. RPA helps consolidate data from specific systems or documents to reduce the manual business processes involved with compliance reporting.

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Such fragmented processes could lead to messy workflow, extra costs, and the risk of misstating financial results. With all systems integrated, financial teams can get a complete, 360-degree view of all accounting processes. It helps to understand the logic behind all financial reports, allowing make smarter business decisions.

According to Gartner, human error within the finance function produces, on average, 25,000 hours of avoidable rework at a cost of $878,000 per year. RPA removes the inconsistencies of human performance and consistently delivers accurate results, ensuring you can compile data to analyze financial reporting faster and more reliably. Your finance and accounting department can offload manual work from full-time employees to automated bots by creating optimized processes that compile data for financial reports.

Manage treasury processes and procedures

If manually performed, these tests can be very time-consuming, but  automated testing with RPA can be smooth and quick. However, this is an integral part of your day-to-day business operations to ensure that data is valid and appropriate. Retail includes labor-intensive, continuous operational and analytics activities. RPA bots can help retail companies without state-of-the-art systems to bridge the gaps in their systems and automate their process.

• With the right platform in place, you don’t have to deal with the payment delays at any time nor do you have to deal with inaccuracies in storing the data.
• Royal Bank of Canada, the largest financial institution in Canada is using smart chatbots for more than a year to improve customer service.
• All modern RPA platforms offer solutions that solve both data extraction and system integration issues.
• Usually, the processes for automation are definable and rule-based, making reporting, accounts payable, clients feedback capture, and so on.
• The UiPath process mining solution provides insights on how the order to cash (O2C) process is performing and gives you the opportunity to verify the root cause of any issues.

Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. Implementing RPA in account receivable helps companies optimize customer invoicing and payments, as well as deliver reports and analytics on the status of AR processes.

Optimization of financial reporting

Based on this information and historic data, modern RPA platforms can also provide forecasts and help improve financial planning. If you adopt RPA bots as your digital workforce, they will issue and email invoices automatically. By automating this task, you will get a consistent cash flow without deficiencies.