Robotic Process Automation in Finance and Accounting: 10 Use Cases

Make sure that the newest members of your finance and accounting team are up-to-speed on all your processes and that they aren’t exposing your organization to increased risk due to costly mistakes. This functionality helps reduce the amount of time spent on training new employees and also reduce the risk of future bot outages. Putting software robots to work for finance and accounting department automation allows you to more efficiently manage high-volume processes across complex infrastructures. RPA is part of the greater trend of hyperautomation, enabling organizations to move from automation that mimics human actions toward automation that uses data to optimize end-to-end finance processes. While accounting principles and processes have changed little in the last 200 years, automation and the cloud have transformed it from a siloed function to a strategic driving force. Companies that adopt these technologies — whether their teams are office-based or digital nomads — will be more resilient, agile and productive and enhance their competitive advantage in the market.

KYC is a necessary and time-consuming process that the BFSI market has to perform for every customer. According to a report by Infosys, a bank spends around $52 million every year on KYC compliance, and for some banks, the spending surges approx $384 million. In addition to the enormous costs, compliance divisions across the financial industry have grown in size, with 150 to 1,000+ full-time equivalents (FTEs) compliance teams. Digits and figures must be accurate to the decimal places to eliminate mismatches in the reconciliation and data processing. Overall accounts payables and receivables can be completely automated with automated invoicing software and RPA in the finance industry. The maker and checker process can be almost eliminated as the machine can match the invoices with the relevant POs.

ERP finance – Making Analytics and Reporting Easy for FinTech Enterprises

It expedites Procure-to-Pay and Record-to-Report processing as well as reduces Days Sales Outstanding figures through Order-to-Cash automation. Datamatics Intelligent Automation Platform has in-built AI algorithms to detect trends and actionable insights. 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 & Accounting leaders believe RPA will make their business more competitive over the next two years, according to the 2019 Economist Survey “Advance of Automation”. Additionally, separate workflows can also be created to approve the accounts payables, process bulk payments, monitor outstanding balances and post year-end adjustments.

RPA also enables better data insights, which results in a better customer experience. The technology frees people to do more valuable, stimulating work while improving the accuracy of their work and making audits run more smoothly. Which finance and accounting practices are the best candidates for automation? UiPath Task Mining and Process Mining can help you discover your best opportunities. Every bank has to post incoming and outgoing fund transfers to the federal reserve, whether the payment orders are routed and settled. As a manual task, this requires an employee to check Fedline (a branch of the Fedwire Funds Service) for inbound transfers to process and post any outgoing transfers.

Here are 3 Use Cases for RPA in Account Payable Processes

In addition, IA analyzes large data sets, identifies anomalies or patterns and extracts insights to support informed decision-making. This enables organizations to generate financial reports faster, accurately predict trends and allocate resources to maximize return on investment (ROI). Along with managing accounts payable, your finance department might also advise or govern the procurement process, including purchasing decisions. If that’s the case, there’s often friction and delays in these manual processes, even when spending and budgeting are approved. Digital workers can automate processing payments, invoice creation, transmission and tracking to increase auditability and reduce late payments.

Thus, for RPA systems to work with your desired efficiency, it’s vital to involve people who are well-versed in accounting and understand your business processes. Retrieving and processing data, maintaining records, doing calculations, and completing transactions are a few finance and accounting tasks that an RPA bot can perform. Finance teams still spend a lot of time bookkeeping and analyzing historical performance. Despite automating basic accounting tasks, they remain markedly invested in preparing and consolidating data for day-to-day reporting.

#10. Financial planning and forecasting

AI/ML offers a variety of ways to streamline and innovate finance and accounting as well as internal audit, as we outlined in the first article of our multi-part series. Here, we explore some of the top use cases and the underlying AI/ML features that enable each of them. Few technology innovations (if any) have been as disruptive and game-changing as recent developments with generative AI and other user-friendly artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools.

You can still develop RPA software that can extract the information from your clients’ social media. As algorithms becomes more prevalent, it’s important for audit teams to develop new capabilities. Prepare for automation and AI’s increased impact in finance by keeping up with current information surrounding algorithmic classification, identification, and risks. Download the full perspective to explore how algorithms are impacting the finance and accounting world. Learn how robotic process automation streamlines processes in the healthcare industry and improves care delivery. Complicated legacy systems are not always flexible in integrating other necessary systems or introducing new processes.

Use cases and applications of RPA in accounting

Digital workers pass work to one another as purchase requests, from first request and purchase order creation to validation. Furthermore, RPA can interact with internal systems, such as ERP and CRM, enabling seamless data exchange and facilitating end-to-end automation. Through RPA applications in finance, businesses can focus on more value-added tasks while time-consuming tasks are efficiently managed by RPA bots. Consequently, a streamlined and cost-efficient team can focus on delivering better customer service and enhancing the overall customer experience. With the use of AI and ML in robotic process automation, FinTech companies can improve their capabilities and ensure smooth operations.

• But with manual processing, there’s always a question of accuracy when collecting and keying in data from multiple sources.
• Accounting Today is a leading provider of online business news for the accounting community, offering breaking news, in-depth features, and a host of resources and services.
• Based on this information, the application generates reports in multiple formats, as required.
• Auto-collect data from ERP and other F&A enterprise systems and generate reports by using RPA.
• Is your team re-keying data from PDF invoices to spreadsheets to accounting software for internal reporting?
• Here are eight benefits companies can reap by integrating RPA into their finance processes.

RPA translates benefits to these F&A institutions for it’s an automation tool that not only accelerates the process but also ensures there are no clerical errors. The revenue from the global robotic process automation market size is expected to grow to $11 billion by 2027 compared to $1.40 billion in 2019. So, if you have any queries regarding the RPA implementation process, its benefits, and how it will work for your business, just drop us an email at When considering the processes mentioned above, it is important to take an objective view and identify any areas where improvements can reduce waste.

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Use AI/ML algorithms in the workflow to incorporate value-added features, such as auto-GL coding and auto-approval routing. Reduce manual efforts to the order of 80 to 90% and improve cycle time by manifolds. Integrate visual reporting tools to get real-time visual reports, such as Spend Analytics and Vendor Rating. IA supports finance and accounting professionals by automating those manual processes that leave room for inconsistent and error-prone data. With IA, you can delegate manual tasks across disparate systems and data sets to digital workers.

“RPA can automate and speed this process up, as well as reduce human errors,” Dean said. One challenge is enabling finance departments to easily create new bots while also providing guardrails. “The quickest wins have been more rules-based processes that are more amenable to RPA,” said Dennis Gannon, vice president of advisory services at Gartner. Instead, you will want to continuously analyze the results that you achieve while considering how to improve even further. By “minding the gaps” in your automation with the use of advanced tools such as Kofax RPA, you can nurture a better means of doing business.

RPA In Finance

Leverage this data to optimize customers’ credits, track orders and invoices, and process payments. RPA streamlines the collection of vendor invoices and automatically assigns these to the workers based on a pre-established set of rules. Auto-ingest data from the Excel file or its image received from any source and route the data to the enterprise core system, such as SAP, by using intelligent document processing. Extract financial data rpa use cases in finance and accounting from the balance sheets of companies by using intelligent document processing. Create the credit assessment profiles by using RPA and compare the credit status of different companies before enrolling in different programs. Datamatics Intelligent Automation Platform is modular and enables businesses to leverage end-to-end automation of the entire CFO Back-office with real-time processing, speedy reconciliations, and faster closures.