RPA in Finance and Accounting Process

Finance & Accounting

According to a KPMG report, over 43% of the senior executives surveyed indicated their willingness to invest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The trend was visible when CFOs of different companies started adapting Robotic Process Automation to their different processes to lower costs, increase efficiency, and minimize error.

In fact, companies no longer think about ‘if’ the process is worth implementing, they think about ‘how’ they can adapt it to the organization.

Benefits of RPA in Finance and Accounting Process

Saves time by automating the manual tasks, freeing up the employees to focus on tasks that require human intelligence skills
Helps in syncing up with other application software for more benefits
Helps in minimizing error and increasing productivity
Easy to operate even without a background IT

Uses of RPA in Finance and Accounting Process

Accounts Receivables

Organizations prefer first to implement RPA in Account Receivables before other processes, as it is less dependent on outside data. The software helps the team to save time on generating sales quote, validating order data, monitor customer credits, distribute invoice, and match and process payment after validation.

Accounts Payable

RPA digitizes invoices receives from different vendors using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It extracts all the fields in the invoice and validates it. To make it uniform, it creates an invoice by filling the invoice form with the extracted data. The invoice is then routed for payment via the workflow. On the payment date, the software automatically executes the payment and credits it to the vendor’s bank account. The payment file is sent to the bank, and the reports are reconciled in the system.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a time-consuming process, as it requires the accounts department to find information about the money spent and received to balance the final figures. RPA helps in easing this process by matching the payment details with bank data and other records. If the details match, the records are reconciled. However, in case of any unmatched or suspicious transactions found, the software sends the records for further validation.

General Ledger

Another time-consuming process used to manage the balance sheets and income statement transactions, General Ledger is one of the processes financial that organizations automate to reduce the efforts of the employees. In this process, the RPA implements account reconciliation standards according to the policies and procedures and reconcile the general ledger accounts according to the workflow. Once the reconciliation process is complete, the software documents that the balance is accurate.

Bill Generation

RPA helps the finance team in generating automatic bills and managing them. It helps in entering timely and accurate billing details in the system, which helps the team to save time significantly without any errors. It is easy to deploy and causes minimal disruption to the system.

Reports Automation

As a part of compliance, an organization has to prepare multiple financial reports. While there are templates to manage them, it becomes difficult for the accounts team to gather information from disparate systems and integrate them to prepare them. RPA helps in preparing internal and external reports for management’s analysis by gathering and integrating information from different sources and schedules it to be sent to the external sources automatically.