The financial industry is the most fascinating industry which has been looked up by everyone and the extraordinary hindrances faced by the company in the year 2020.
Financial companies and the overall industry can make their functionalities back to normal with proper implementation of RPA in accounting.
RPA can add value to the customers as the automation has the potency to attract and engage the customers.
Why are banks investing in RPA tools?
The technology must be properly utilized to render the best services to the customers and to survive in this competitive market implementation of technology is the need of an hour.
RPA in financial services facilitates maximized efficiency with the help of automation of repetitive tasks without slaughtering the workforce.
Banking and financial institutions need to have competitive immunity over its competitors and inculcating RPA will cut down the costs and escalate the business functioning by providing the best customer service.
Apart from all the industries, RPA’s adoption is majorly observed in accounting and finance.
Oh yeah! Let’s discuss the core of the article. 5 best use cases of RPA in accounting:
1. RPA in Accounts Receivables
- The ideal management of Account receivables must not be underrated as it affects the cash flow in a direct manner.
- Mismanagement of tasks results in unwanted gaps in the accounts.
- The constant pressure to keep the accounts receivables and payables in the track is to ensure that the company’s financial position is good and there are no confusing transactions.
- The overall process is quite a time consuming as all the inputs are to be taken manually and making the chain of multiple systems.
- RPA in Accounts receivables curbs out all the possibilities of human error when it comes to drafting the profitability index of the company.
- Another tedious process managed by the RPA under this category is managing the Day sales outstanding at a lower level and it completely depends on the human factor when we have payee as well as the recipient on the other side.
- As of now, it appears that Accounts Receivables is a great start when we talk about automation in finance departments.
2. RPA in accounts payable
- Processing accounts payable is an important part when it comes to managing the accounting department.
- Vendor invoices are not standardized and it needs to be cross-examined escorted as per the purchasing order.
- By deploying RPA bots in the digital workforce, invoices can get automated to all the members of the staff who are responsible for its reminders, approval, and such things can even get executed periodically.
- RPA Bots function on a straightforward process where the purchase order gets properly executed along with the necessary invoice and gets compared with a flag for its review.
3. RPA in Client Onboarding
- With all the regulations of compliance which grows stronger and stronger, the KYC process is eradicated unnecessarily as the employees are spending long hours via internal and external systems to gather proper information of customers.
- By inculcating RPA, bots can also be the ones that collect all the information with proper use of optical character recognition.
- The data which has been collected further gets matched with all the necessary information on all the files and reports which get looked upon by the compliance manager.
- This helps the compliance manager to make a confirmed decision.
- If there are no disagreements then only bots transfer the data into the customer’s profile.
4. Intercompany Reconciliations
- Finance automation has numerous kinds of reconciliations.
- In the extreme period of report end, Accounting must enclose all the records in the month to maintain an equilibrium and deliver error-free financial statements to stay intact and keep a continuous track if any further issue arises.
- The overall process is the source of constant troublesome periods for accountants and paying thanks to all the manual data extraction and entry, overtime work and attention must be discussed in detail.
- Further, it stops all the activities of the entire accounts department.
- With the assistance of robotics, the team can drastically move their focus from number-crunching to perform such analytical work which does not happen with only bots.
- The customized bot can get properly set to keep a track of all the orders and transactional data which gets collected from a wide range of sources.
- Robots will automatically approve all the orders that match and notify in case of discrepancies.
- Bank statements can get downloaded and can be linked with user accounts, validating all the balances and transactions, creating journals, and even more.
5. Travel and Expense Processing
- Before the widespread pandemic, Individuals often migrated and made travel for business conferences, meetings, and even vacations.
- They often got back with invoices and receipts. By the end of the trips, receipts still need to find their own way to all the accounting departments and the expense reports.
- When the invoices and receipts are processed by humans then they might find some errors in the receipts and some might be missing and many of it cannot get considered as a business expense.
- This overall process directly affects the compliance and adversely affects the job satisfaction of the employees which are directly responsible for that particular task.
- Software Robots can not only pull the data from all the forms that have been submitted.
- Forms initially get compared with the inter-company policies and regulatory norms and also notifies the accounting departments as well as the employee when there is any violation of policy.
Concluding Lines
Here in this article we just consider the best 5 use cases of RPA in accounting and finance.
Robotic Process Automation permits all the accounting firms to reach the optimum level of excellence without hampering the quality and the valuable time of the employees.
With the help of such automation, the companies can perform better and with proper pace and where the growth is effortless and seamless.
About the Author: Parth Patel is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of SyS Creations which is a top provider of RPA in Accounting. Operating the IT Infrastructure of SMEs and startups keeps him on his toes and his passion for helping others keeps him motivated.