In a familiar scenario, with month-end closing on the horizon, an excel sheet surfacing on the computer screen, and the steady tap of keyword stokes make financial analysts think why my organization didn’t automate.

As per the IMA report,” Around two-thirds of financial analysts said the heavy reliance on spreadsheets increases both the time spent on financial reporting as well as the risk of inaccurate results.“

Considering the risks and problems associated with spreadsheets, including changing accounting standards, time requirements, input errors, and spreadsheet cell linking, the high reliance on spreadsheets is alarming. Typically, the accounting comprises of four key processes-

• Account payable/receivable
• Journal Entry
• Account Reconciliation
• Financial Closure

On average, It takes almost seven days to complete the financial closure process. Being a manual, rule-based, and time-consuming process, RPA in accounting can genuinely transform how financial analysts handle accounting.

Let’s dig into this blog and learn more about the accounting process RPA can automate and its impact on financial reporting.

Accounting Process Automation With RPA

As most accounting processes are time-consuming and repetitive and require high precision and accuracy, RPA bots come in handy in accelerating efficiency and cutting operational costs.
RPA chatbots are capable of automating the below accounting process-

• Account Payable(AP)
  Account payable is one of the most crucial business processes that handle getting, processing, and paying out the money companies owe for goods and services. Financial accountants have to complete repetitive tasks such as receiving the bill, scrutinizing the statements for details like vendor name, authorization, purchase order verification, extracting data, processing on-time invoices for the payment, etc. In order to have an efficient account payable process, RPA bots can streamline the whole process by eliminating most of the paperwork involved in accounting, invoice processing, and extracting data. In addition, using RPA chatbots with in-built OCR and AI reduces the time involved in the data extraction and enhances day-to-day operation.
• Account Receivable (AR)
  Account receivable encompasses everything from credit application to invoice, follow-up, and debt collection. The traditional approach to account receivable involves –
  1. • Extracting data from an excel spreadsheet for invoice generation
     • Matching invoices with the accurate details
     • Routing invoices for approvals
     • Processing payments

  On the other hand, the manual follow-up and collection process involves credit evaluation error, invoices operational cost, and high credit risk. Automating the account receivable process with the RPA chatbot can simplify the invoice delivery, update the status in real-time and notify the customer instantly without any manual intervention. In addition, RPA in account receivables enable financial institutions to scale up and down without headcount and training challenges and improves invoice processing accuracy and delivery.

• Account Reconciliation
  The account reconciliation process has multiple steps, such as.
  • Scrutinizing the validity of issued checks
  • Updating transaction records
  • Comparing customer and vendor invoices
  • Identifying unrecorded transactions in invoices, loan deposits, etc

  Moreover, the account reconciliation process relies heavily on invoices, pdfs, and accounting records. As per a report, the account reconciliation process takes 44% of the time to maintain the balance sheet. Using a predefined rule-based chatbot enables the financial accountant to streamline the entire reconciliation process by quickly extracting data, matching & comparing invoices, and providing real-time visibility to the reconciliation process. Furthermore, RPA in the accounting reconciliation process removes the risk of the old paper-based world, a manual check of spreadsheet information, and creating post-check records updates.
  

• Data Entry Automation
  Banking institutions rely heavily on documents and data extraction from multiple legacy systems. For example, before generating the final invoice and transaction report, financial accountants have to go through reading text files, excel sheets to derive data from the account payable and receivable process. In addition, manually matching reconciliation reports, transactions details, supporting documents, and uploading gathered information in the central legacy system require high precision and accuracy.
  Financial process automation automatically verifies and inputs the data in real-time and efficiently transfers, exchanges, and records transaction data in the ERP system. By outsourcing the data entry to RPA bots significantly reduces financial workload.
• Financial Closure
  Producing a final report outlining the company’s financial status requires substantial manual effort. Challenges that financial accountants face are-
  • Manual Data Entry
  • Data manipulation process
  • Segregating multiple format data
  • Missing receipts, journal entries, and transactions mismatch
  • Real-time information access

  To beat these challenges and optimize the financial closure process RPA bot comes in handy. RPA bots can quickly and efficiently

  • Import spreadsheet from multiple resources to central legacy systems
  • Run automated checklist to identify and highlight account issues
  • Track progress, timeline, approval, and potential error
  • Compare financial data using reconciliation details

How Should Companies Automate Accounting?

RPA in accounting can be leveraged by following three approaches. These are-RPA in accounting can be leveraged by following three approaches.
These are-

Out-of-Box Automation

Rule-based RPA bot can handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks at ease, but what if your financial organization wants more than that. Having Conversational RPA is an end-to-end automation solution that provides faster resolutions with AI and machine learning technologies.
By leveraging omnichannel support, Conversational RPA provides AI-assisted decision-making assistance, understands human context, and provides instant resolution. No more missed opportunities and erroneous data entry; Conversational RPA automatically generates reports and updates.

Customized Automation Solutions

RPA is the most flexible solution to automate any process. And Financial organizations looking to automate their business processes must have an in-house look at bot maintenance costs. A customized solution like RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) enables customers to avoid confusing prices ahead in RPA adoption. RPA pricing model precisely eliminates the air of uncertainty and confusion and enables financial organizations to adopt RPA in accounting with no additional costs and holes in their pocket.

End-To-End Automation

Before deploying RPA in the financial process, organizations thoroughly test new solutions and vendors. An end-to-end automation partner leads your organization by assessing your readiness, building a business case, designing an operating model, managing business change, and developing a roadmap to scale RPA by starting small.

Benefits of Implementing RPA in Accounting

With RPA in accounting, financial organizations have a lot to leverage by using AI technologies. Implementing RPA in accounting helps in-

Avoid Financial Fraud

Fraudsters stay one step ahead of technology when it comes to financial transactions. To be ahead of the fraudster curve, organizations need to invest in the next generation of fraud risk management. As per a report,” Automation is the future of fraud risk management.” Using AI capabilities such as Machine Learning(ML) systems can easily distinguish between suspicious and legitimate transactions. Furthermore, Machine Learning(ML) technologies can analyze big data quickly and continuously learn with each interaction and process and react to new fraudulent suspicions faster.

Enhanced Information Quality

Financial organizations suffer from poor data quality because of the enormous amount of data. Providing on-time resolution and routing the data to the right place is challenging for financial accountants. RPA in the financial business process eliminates the error rate, enhances accuracy, and provides smarter interaction. With real-time data access, accountants instantly provide resolution and share information independently and limit manual intervention across the organization.

Promote Audit Efficiency

Auditing financial data is one of the critical functions in the accounting process. However, manually collecting data from disparate sources is time-consuming and labor-intensive. With RPA in the economic accounting space, fast-track the auditing process by accurately collecting all the information required from the multiple legacy systems and making decisions independently. In addition, as technology advances, economic value is expected to increase, providing proactive insights and root cause analysis.

Adopt RPA to Scale Big

The age of Robotic Process Automation is here, and when it comes to integrating technology into your financial process, RPA adoption is the need of the hour for financial organizations. Long burdened by manual and repetitive tasks, RPA can turn the grunt work over to digital bots who don’t mind long working hours and repetitive tasks. Hence, with the bot in space, employees can better use their intelligence where the human touch is needed.

With the Conversational RPA, AI, and Automation capabilities, AutomationEdge is on a mission to build a delightful workplace experience for employees and customers with Conversational AI, RPA, and IT solutions. Request a demo here or visit www.automationedge.com to learn how these technologies can help you ace the digital transformation game.

Every organization’s finance and accounting departments are overburdened due to the lack of trained resources, increased transactional volume, repetitive manual tasks, and siloed and diverse input sources. And, adding new employees will never eradicate the problem as the training and remuneration will multiply drastically. The smartest move is to fill these productivity gaps in the financial sector with the power of automation and RPA.

Robotic Process Automation has emerged as the fastest-growing solution across the finance sector, transforming all human-driven processes in order-to-cash, record-to-report, and procure-to-pay. It eliminates all data entry errors to deliver complete accuracy and slashed processing times—at the minimum possible cost compared to the manual team. RPA allows enterprises to benefit from a quick implementation and lightning-fast ROI immediately.

Financial institutes globally, are still treading water and struggling to mitigate human involvement to boost their output drastically and seamlessly. Usually, they start small with tightly articulated pilot programs that have limited funding but more explicit objectives. In multiple countries, the tax impositions and legalities are too complex to be managed proficiently by humans. In such a scenario, RPA solutions can allow these teams to spend comparatively less time on repetitive activities and focus on developing their strategic goals.

Considering the finance industry, below are the top activities that impact productivity and control:

Download of Tax Return Files: It is very common for companies to spend time for a collaborator to access the accounts and download the tax return files or slips to carry out the reconciliation later. This task can be time-consuming and could inflict errors in the operations.

Account Receivable or Accounts Payable Automation: AR or AP Automation allows modernization of all accounts receivable or payable processes leveraging RPA and electronic systems for a more prompt delivery mechanism of invoices.

Invoice Processing Automation: Automation of invoice processing simplifies invoice data extraction, information population in the accounts payable system, and invoice data processing. Effectively used, all invoice automation systems save valuable time and money.

Month-end Closing: Month-end closing automation platforms simplifies all critical month-end tasks expediently, as the software handles all complicated calculation at a single click.

Automated Reconciliation: Automated reconciliation effectively speeds up all accounting processes by automatically verifying all bank statements against transaction records.

Processes Payment Slips in the ERP: Businesses automate not only the download of bills, receipts or collection but also it’s processing in the management platforms such as SAP and/or TOTVS, eliminating the need to deploy an FTE to overlook this activity.

Update Varied Certificates: Many companies need to keep several certificates updated, and for that, they need to control and access several websites. With automation, businesses can leave these activities with a robot, executing them more often, and tracking their maturity date.

Registration and Validation of Suppliers: For some customers, the volume of new supplier requests are much higher, and so they struggle with the registration process every time they add new suppliers. By automating this task, teams can save the registration time and perform a more constant audit on these suppliers for their tax framework more simply and regularly. This will save the time spent on these tasks by the employees, boosting the revenue further.

[Also Read: Why, Where and How of RPA in Banking and Financial Services Industry ]

Top Benefits of Finance Process Automation
Financial automation eliminates all clunky procedures, freeing humans from the heavy-lifting tasks. Below mentioned are the few top benefits that finance process automation delivers across industries.

Data Integrity: Even the companies with the best finance teams have a massive scope of error as they rely on many things beyond human control. Minor mistakes, changing policies, or difficult suppliers make it challenging to maintain data accuracy. With automation kicking in, enterprises can be confident about zero data errors so that the numbers provided are absolutely accurate.

Improved Efficiency: Shifting from the manual processes to automated ones can allow the finance teams to smoothen all their existing functions. An automatic and reliable one should replace any legacy system that slows the finance team down.

Quicker Approvals: Whether it’s about the budget approval or a significant reimbursement claim, automated approval systems act as a blessing. As an add-on advantage, one can also eliminate all unwieldy email threads required to check each ticket’s status.

360-Degree Visibility: With all systems getting inter-connected, financial teams can get a complete, 360-degree picture of all finances. It helps to understand the proper logic behind all fluctuating financial reports, allowing employees to make quicker and smarter business decisions.

Currently, organizations have built-in their individual automated fraud detection systems to tackle such threats proactively. Most of these mechanisms are based on RPA techniques, allowing banks to monitor and eliminate all threats before they turn out to be unmanageable. Automated notifications and alerts can be generated to relevant parties involved, to trigger a chain of events to ensure timely recovery. Such advanced technology, coupled with predictive analytics and machine learning platforms, can analyze all existing data and track all previous threats to establish a robust defence mechanism to all fraudulent transactions.

[Also Read: Automate Credit Card Processing to Enhance Customer Experience ]

Managing the daily flow of investments and expenses across an organization needs a lot of technical know-how, pressure-handling capabilities, and mental abilities. Bookkeeping and other financial responsibilities involve complicated math. Accountants need to remain on top of floating exchange rates, government regulations, changing international financial standards, and certain strategic executive decisions. Hence, automation and RPA are the new way of finance departments operate, allowing people to redefine their focus on high-value activities for themselves and their company – paving the way for digital transformation!

Insurance sector has always been facing numerous challenges, whether its profits, regulations or compliance; this has led to the birth of ‘Digital Insurers’. Yes! Digital Insurers are the ones for whom customer experience and operational efficiencies matter a lot.

Like other industries digital insurers leverage technology to respond quickly to customers’ demands, are available 24×7 and provide a rich customer experience.

So what are these technologies that make digital insurers different from other insurance companies?

Though there has been a lot of digital transformation happening in insurance industries with technologies like telematics, business intelligence and many more, but one thing that has impacted the bottom line hugely is robotic process automation (RPA).

Robotic Process Automation is on top of the agenda of digital insurers and has provided a competitive advantage to them in terms of optimizing operational efficiencies and customer experience.

Robotic Process Automation in Insurance

RPA helps organizations to automate any mundane repetitive tasks in any process across various departments. It can analyze and process voluminous data quickly and accurately.

Any task that is rule-based can be automated, once the business rules are set, the system makes decisions consistently and accurately every time. As the task is performed by software robots, this eliminates the possibility of errors; also software robots don’t take leave/break or don’t get tired thus processes the information 24/7 without fail.

Thus while software robots are doing mundane and repetitive tasks, your employees can be utilized for complex and innovative tasks.

Process suitable for Automation in insurance

RPA in insurance are applicable in many processes like claims payment process or insurance payment process; generally there is a large team who does the claim processing manually. They follow a standard operating procedure, and that is really made up of a series of reads from their terminal, a series of decisions or business rules and then a series of actions that they take by entering information manually.

Apart from these there are other use cases like : Policy application processing, Claim processing, Enrollment, Account Management, Underwriter support, Customer support, Billing, Collection, Report Consolidation, Reconciliation, Account payable, Account Receivable, HR Administration

[Also Read: RPA in Insurance: Benefits, Use Cases & Challenges 2023]

AutomationEdge RPA solution deployments in the insurance companies

AutomationEdge RPA solution has helped large global insurance companies transform in to the leading digital insurers.  It is successfully deployed in more than 5 insurance companies both life and general insurance companies. AutomationEdge has Implemented various use cases like payout process, new business process, ID management for different insurance applications, no claims bonus and policy servicing to name a few. Few of bots that we have been deployed are processing payout of USD 1 billion + per year automatically. Time for new business quote generation and policy servicing are improved many folds. For example a leading global insurance company is getting benefits like increased business revenue by reduced TAT for new insurance policy quote generation from 3 days to few seconds.