Finance & Accounting Use-Cases for Robotic Process Automation

If we describe our assertion in terms of numbers, then the total annual RPA spendings are intended to reach $4,308 million by 2022. If you believe your business would benefit from adopting an RPA solution, look at our most up-to-date and comprehensive list of RPA products. RPA bots can facilitate inventory controls by alerting you when the stock level is lower than demand. For example, if answering live quiz questions in class is a sign of attendance, RPA bots can match each student’s answer on the day with their name. Or, in virtual classrooms, they can scrape each student’s name and type it into the attendance sheet for that day. The top-10 American colleges, in terms of number of applications, received between 65K-109K applications in 2021.

Produce timely and accurate business reporting, both internally and externally, to drive growth with a more engaged accounting team. Automate complex journal entries, the extraction of monthly reports, and reduce processing times for disclosure. HPE’s accounts payable team processes a considerable volume of paper invoices each month and is responsible for recording vendor invoices for subsequent payment processing. Issues come in the form of multiple invoice formats, a range in the quality of scanned image invoices and the use of multiple languages.

RPA Use Cases In The Real World [Updated 2023]

This technology has become increasingly popular in finance and accounting processes due to its ability to streamline financial processes and improve accuracy. The finance department is vitally important in ensuring workflow efficiencies, reducing risk, and becoming a strategic partner to your business. UiPath offers AI-fueled, end-to-end robotic process automation (RPA) that enables finance-driven innovation. It reduces costs, processing times, and risk to increase both accuracy and your team’s capacity to focus on high-value, strategic work. RPA consists of software robots, or bots, that represent a pattern of reusable automations for tasks and processes.

• With RPA, you can ensure that your payroll submissions are 100% accurate, on time, and fully compliant.
• Global retail corporations need to arrange SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) data from multiple markets to be able to look beyond numbers to insights like “What is our shaving cream market share in Eastern Europe?
• When considering the processes mentioned above, it is important to take an objective view and identify any areas where improvements can reduce waste.
• In addition, the functionalities that the internal tools provide would be more targeted enabling more efficient usage.
• RPA in financial planning allows businesses to provide forecasts at a faster rate and constantly have an updated view of the latest capital expenditures, investments, and financial statements.

On the one hand, it may seem that everyone is just obsessed with the automation of processes, and it is difficult to find a logical explanation for such high popularity. Automation of work processes significantly increases the income of enterprises, which is the main reason for its popularity. You can see more detailed statistics of RPA income for different regions in the picture below.

RPA Generative AI: Top 15 Use Cases in 2023

Is your team re-keying data from PDF invoices to spreadsheets to accounting software for internal reporting? Such fragmented processes could lead to messy workflow, extra costs, and the risk of misstating financial results. RPA can greatly reduce the quantity of manual, repetitive and time-consuming tasks performed by finance experts so they can focus on more valuable activities, such as P&L reporting, Chawla said.

A unified approach based on the concepts of intelligent automation not only leverages RPA when it can provide value, but also brings in other critical tools, including AI, machine learning, OCR, and more. While RPA can assist with these tasks, some organizations will find that it isn’t fully suited to the complexity or multi-step process they use. Tools that deliver full-cycle accounts payable automation provide a more tailored approach to these tasks.

Innovation in data

With the implementation of RPA, fraud detection becomes more accessible, and the frequency of fraudulent activities also decreases. In addition, by notifying all the stakeholders of the relevant changes at business or regulatory levels, RPA ensures that no risk slips through the crack. SS&C Blue Prism enables business leaders of the future to navigate around the roadblocks of ongoing digital transformation in order to truly reshape and evolve how work gets done – for the better. The total price of the inventory along with the number of items and their respective quantities are calculated.

This leaves HR and payroll teams with more time to focus on higher-value tasks such as employee engagement and talent management. Dean implemented one system for a banking and insurance company that wanted to improve various processes involved in master data management and financial account maintenance. For example, they used RPA to automate three back-office processes related to seizure of financial assets for customers based on official legal requests made by executors. People could then focus on more judgement-oriented tasks such as reviewing and validating the data being updated.

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Post approval, auto-execute a cash transfer to the required accounts by using RPA. Finance, with its accounting and procurement departments, meets both criteria. As a business function, it’s famous for repetitive, time-consuming tasks like data entry, reporting, cross-checking, and record keeping, which are the perfect food for RPA bots. On the other hand, most processes are more or less structured and rule-based, as there are almost no exceptions or human decision-making involved. RPA solutions allow businesses to collect customer information by accessing databases, gathering data from documents, and social media. Analysts spend a lot of time searching for information on complex government resources, the FBI, Interpol, and more.

Starting with those processes allows finance teams to focus on the quick achievable RPA wins, get feedback on what works well, and then find more tasks that are easy to automate. The Tax function is filled with routine processes that are rpa accounting use cases still being performed manually in order to prepare reports and file information required by the law. Disparate systems and finance processes for many organizations often create a challenge in gathering and reconciling tax-related data.

How to implement RPA in finance and accounting

Overall, digital workers automate repetitive tasks alongside your HR staff to free up valuable time and resources. Digital workers can help with financial reporting by automating the process of data collection, analysis and report generation. This can reduce the risk of errors and improve the accuracy of financial documents, as well as save time and resources. They extract key data from invoices such as vendor name, invoice number, date, amount and line items, and enter it into accounting software or ERP systems with high accuracy and speed.

Once you’ve achieved these short-term values, you can look at those broader finance and accounting practices with re-engineering potential. TruCap+ enabled the conversion of unstructured invoices & receipts into structured ones and automatically captured the relevant data from the incoming files in the system. Automate quarterly cashflow forecasting for ongoing and new projects, improve collections, and reduce day sales outstanding by using RPA bots.

Improved Customer Experience

In addition, they can easily be integrated with machine learning models to take on more complex tasks. Finance departments always push other business units to be lean and cost-efficient. RPA allows finance departments to achieve that so they can be an example to other businesses.