Finance and Accounting departments across all industries, manage and handle similar processes like account reconciliation, purchase order &invoice processing, revenue audit, financial budgeting & planning, risk, and regulatory compliance, etc.
Financial reconciliation is a key process, though a standard one, for almost every business. It involves a tedious workflow wherein, the finance team has to ensure that every invoice has been received and their entries have been updated in the system. They need to check for data discrepancies that may arise due to duplicate entries or missing invoices.
Account reconciliation has to be performed regularly to maintain accurate financial statements. Many organizations are still, handling these processes manually, leading to reporting errors and significant delays due to manual adjustments and scrutiny from regulators and auditors.
Financial processes like account reconciliation can be easily managed with automation software since it’s a highly repetitive process and has a standard workflow and protocols which need to be followed.
Robotic process automation (RPA) helps to digitize the entire accounting and financial processes. It automates the core financial processes and significantly reduces the reliance on manual controls, data errors, delays in accounts payable and accounts receivable.
According to a recent Gartner CFO Survey, there has been a dramatic digital acceleration since COVID-19 and CFO’s are realizing the core value of adopting innovative digital technologies to drive process efficiency. Most finance leaders are embracing RPA to remove manual repetitive tasks and free up team members to focus on value-added work.
RPA can help to streamline the reconciliation process by providing much better control and data accuracy. It can help greatly to speed up the entire process with automation with negligible chances of error due to no human intervention.
Some of the sub-processes within finance and accounting that can be automated with RPA :
General Accounting & Reconciliation
- General ledger and sub-ledger reconciliations
- Bank reconciliations
- Inter-company reconciliations
- Manual journal entries
- Reclassification journal entries
- Fixed asset accounting
- Inter-company settlements
- Financial close activities
Account Payable and Receivable
- Sales order entry
- Customer data set up
- Customer data management
- Billing/invoicing
- Cash application
- Credit risk management
- Dispute verification and
- resolution
- Chargeback management
- Accounts payable accrual
- journal entry
- Expense compliance audit
- Payment processing
Advantages of using RPA for financial process automation
- Improve accuracy – Robots handle all the repetitive tasks like data entry, invoice processing, bank reconciliations, eliminating processing errors, and ensuring better accuracy
- Enhance Speed – Faster execution of statement reconciliation with the efficient matching of records
- Reduce costs – Automation of manual processes and data validation checks leading to the overall efficiency of financial operations.
- Streamline cash flow – The accounts payable and accounts receivable functions enhance cash flow with the automation of invoicing and reconciliation tasks.
- Ease of use: Easy to set up, user-friendly and low maintenance
- Empower employees – Automation helps to eliminate repetitive and manual work to free employees for value add work
TeBS competency in financial process automation
Our RPA services team has worked with varying enterprises ranging from SME to mid to large companies, helping them to automate their business processes and maximize ROI. We have done numerous RPA implementations within the finance division and have automated processes like account receivables, account payable, bank reconciliation journal entries, etc.
We partnered with a leading housing estate organization and helped them to automate their daily financial reconciliation using the UiPath platform process to enhance their operational efficiency.
Leveraging the UiPath RPA platform, we were able to automate the existing manual data entry to the system by setting up a business logic for the Bot to perform the activity as per the business requirement.
The following were the main functionalities for the robotic process automation process to perform:
- Get data from AXS source files
- Getting source from billing system and update control list
- Get data from the ERP system
- Check for discrepancies
- Record discrepancies into control list
- Creating Journal vouchers in the financial accounting system
- Route the Document to the approving officer
- Journal voucher steps in payable system
- Print final-printer PV/JV in pdf format
- Attach supporting docs and files in PDF
- Digital signing of PDF
We also built customized templates to capture the steps and record key values in them, which were to be kept as a backup plan.
With the implementation of RPA for their financial reconciliation process, we were able to increase their efficiency and decrease processing costs by 2x, and scaled them for the future.
At Total eBiz Solutions Pte Ltd(TeBS), we strive to provide our customers with the best ROI for automation projects across their entire processes. We are an established UiPath Diamond Partner and a Certified UiPath Service Network (USN) partner and are strongly committed to making RPA deployment successful by leveraging the implemented solution to drive efficiency and reduce costs.
