Despite efforts to streamline operations through outsourcing and process simplification, many businesses still rely on manual tasks like processing purchase orders or reconciling data across spreadsheets. But there’s a better solution for these repetitive activities: Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA mimics human actions by following predefined rules to automate routine tasks. If you can document a process step-by-step, it can likely be automated—freeing up your team to focus on more strategic work.
Implementing RPA isn’t just about efficiency; it’s also cost-effective. Typically, RPA costs about one-third of an Accounts Administrator’s salary, while providing 24/7 availability and the capacity to handle peak periods like year-end activities. Most RPA solutions pay for themselves within 9 to 12 months.
Although RPA may seem complex, it doesn’t require extensive system integration. It overlays existing systems and even works with older, green-screen interfaces. With many cloud-based options available, deployment is straightforward and doesn’t require significant upfront investment—just virtual machines to get started.
Examples of RPA within Finance and Accounting
Purchase Order (PO) Processing
Finance teams can spend considerable time extracting the information from POs and chasing approvals. RPA, combined with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), can read and extract the data from the PO and manage the workflow to the approver, even sending emails and reading the responses.
Order to Cash
RPA can seamlessly interact with order channels - online, email or even in writing, and transcribe that data into the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or order management system, improving accuracy and response times.
Three-way matching
Purchase orders, invoices and goods received notes can all be completed by a bot in a fraction of the time it takes the workforce, irrespective of system or medium. This ensures fast, accurate payments and data is reconciled across all the systems.
Reconciliations
RPA can automate the download and collation of separate spreadsheets and accounting systems and run reconciliations – all you need to do is manage any exceptions.
Risk assessment and compliance
Bots can monitor data sources and automatically alert if any set criteria are breached, raising risks to the financial controller. Additionally, a change in tax or regulations may require hundreds of related changes across accounting systems. RPA can manage bulk changes much faster than a human.
Collections, payroll and tax
RPA can support the collections workflow, checking accounts, sending requests for payment, escalations and alerting. It can also extract timesheets, data, take account of sickness/holidays and verify information across multiple systems whilst supporting the tax process by gathering the necessary data and creating the reports required for the submission.
An extension of your team
It is important to note that RPA’s focus isn’t losing the human touch, or making workers redundant, but helping to shift from repetitive manual tasks. This will allow your team to add value elsewhere, and transform your KPIs by implementing major cost savings, improving responsiveness, accuracy and compliance.
Any finance department with large volumes of repetitive activities can benefit from RPA without the headache of a major deployment. It is simple to roll out and will already be on the radar of your CIO or CEO.
If your company is looking to accelerate your processes, get in touch with our team today. We bring technical skills, quality, efficiency, and transparency to every project, managing the end-to-end process with complete care and control.