6 min read
By: Ram Agarwal on June 2, 2021
Over a decade, the finance and accounting department has had an overwhelming number of increased transactions, repetitive manual tasks, siloed and diverse input sources. However, automation is evolving across businesses and the finance industry. Automating and implementing RPA in the financial processes is the smart move to close productivity gaps and overcome the challenges.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is changing the way the business operates, enabling simple individual task automation to full process automation. RPA technology is helping finance leaders streamline and potentially transform the finance department. In doing so, RPA could improve the accuracy of financial analysis and forecasts.
According to the Gartner report, around 80% of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to implement RPA. CFO leaders and finance professionals look through RPA as a proven technology and an opportunity to multiply operational success. As it also allows an enterprise to benefit from quick implementation and lightning-fast ROI.
The use of RPA in finance is not limited to automating mundane document processing. It also enables businesses to build quality customer relationships. Read on this blog for how RPA can transform your finance and accounting operations alongside the benefits of RPA and use cases in F&A departments.
Benefits of RPA in Finance & Accounting
Gartner predicted that businesses will spend over $1.5 billion on RPA software this year and that the trend will continue in digital percentage terms for years to come. At some point in 2023, Deloitte projected that RPA adoption will be nearly universal.
Numerous other stats and anecdotes support this claim. Giving away more clarity over why Finance executives are hyping RPA. Beyond automating repetitive tasks, RPA technology provides potential
opportunities to businesses to transform critical finance processes.
Here are the benefits of RPA in the finance & accounting department to unfold with advancing automation.
Enhanced Data Integrity
Even the best finance teams can make errors since they depend on many things beyond their control. The accuracy of data can be compromised by minor mistakes, changing policies, or difficult transactions. Enterprises can rest assured that their data will be error-free thanks to automation because their numbers will be accurate.
Optimized Efficiency
The finance teams can streamline all their existing processes by moving from manual to automated processes. The finance team should replace any legacy system that slows them down with one that is automated and reliable.
Faster Approvals
It does not matter if you need approval for a budget request or a significant reimbursement claim. By having an RPA, you can eliminate the hassle of checking each ticket's status through long and unwieldy email threads.
Improved Visibility
By connecting all systems, financial teams can get a 360-degree view of all finances & accounting operations. By understanding the proper logic behind fluctuating financial reports, employees will be able to make faster and more advantageous business decisions.
Mitigate Risk
RPA can alleviate the administrative burden associated with ensuring data privacy under stringent data privacy regulations. Regardless of the data center and format, RPA can capture relevant information, interpret it, perform assigned tasks, and provide a quick result. Additionally, this enables faster response times to incoming requests, as well as the ability to maintain audit trails automatically without the need for human interaction.
Some of the Use Cases for RPA in Finance & ACCOUNTING
1. Accounts Payable
Accounting and finance departments can use RPA to streamline invoice processing, resulting in increased accuracy and cost savings. Invoices, for instance, are digitized and extracted into a centralized place where they can be integrated and reconciled with other process information using RPA. By doing so, invoice processing is accelerated, which minimizes the chance of errors and prevents financial penalties and delays in payments.
2. Expense Management Process
The RPA automates the approval and payment of expenses by comparing receipts to company policies, managing receipts, and creating the necessary reports based on data inputs. By optimizing and automating this process, both sides of the equation benefit, because the process is more compliant, expense submissions are faster, and manual effort decreases. As a result, employees can focus on higher-value tasks, and finance and accounting employees can save time, resources, and money.
3. Investment Management
RPA platform can act as both an investment manager and financial advisor for your business. The bots can calculate and track the value of an investment over time. They can manage risks and evaluate the portfolio. By providing you with information about the market changes in real-time, will allow you to make more informed investment decisions.
4. Financial Planning and Forecasting
Before implementation, RPA is essential to plan and targets you would desire to achieve through automation. Automated tools can be set up to process historic data, create financial forecasts based on it, and produce variance reports. Leaving financial and accounting employees to handle the complex reasoning processes involved in putting together a plan.
5. Tax Reporting
Taxes are filled with routine processes that are still performed manually, including the preparation of reports and the filing of information required by law. Many organizations encounter difficulties collecting and reconciling tax-related data due to dissimilar systems and processes. This is when RPA technology can be placed in charge of gathering data, preparing reports, calculating the tax payable, and even submitting filings to tax authority portals.
More use cases are including financial operations, travel and expense processing, intercompany reconciliations, client onboarding, training, accounts receivables, and much more. There are enormous possibilities with RPA in finance and accounting operations.
The Bottom Line
RPA - Robotic Process Automation can be used to improve efficiency, agility, and profitability in your business. Companies worldwide are becoming convinced that automated processes are crucial and embracing them as part of their strategies as RPA technology rapidly transforms their finance and accounting departments.
Businesses need to capitalize and get the possible outcomes from your RPA initiative. Since it handles a massive amount of paperwork, repetitive time-consuming tasks, RPA can help in eliminating the time spent on processing these documents. However, businesses are yet to explore the fullest potential of RPA in finance departments.
Intelligent automation can help finance teams to deliver better outcomes without any hassle. Many finance companies and departments have embarked on their automation journey. Now it is your turn.
At Global Technology solutions, we help the organization and finance & accounting team in automating their mundane processes through RPA. Together with UiPath, we create software robots that automate end-to-end your finance & accounting process using machine learning and artificial intelligence automation.
Get a fully automated finance and accounting department with Global technology solutions. Reach us out today!
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