RPA Skyrockets Accounting Industry

Accounting departments and accountants majorly focus on the day-to-day monetary flow within and out of the company. Record keeping and all other tasks like maintaining paper receipts, managing and creating invoices, etc. using paper documentation is truly an ordeal for them. CFOs hold the responsibility to manage the assets and liabilities of the company.

Thereafter, plan the strategy for the growth of the organization. Both departments have to manage the flow and liquidity of finances to ensure the smooth running of their organization. The accounting and finance departments cannot afford to put the business at risk with their inaccurate and lenient work.

This is why traditional methods of handling accounts and finances of the company are no more in trend and companies today are adopting RPA to take hold of it.

Introducing the Digital Workforce

Robotic process automation does not mean a typical robot working as an employee. It refers to a software program that is designed to do all manual, repetitive tasks to enhance the better and efficient working of the company. RPA introduced a digital workforce - “bots” to manage all the complex tasks within the finance and accounting domain. It has reduced average time processing per transaction by up to 60%. Robotic colleagues perform without any error and ensure the profitability of the business.

 Implementing robots in this sector have numerous benefits such as:-

1. Accuracy in bookkeeping and results
2. Ease in data handling
3. Automated repetitive tasks
4. Error-free processing of AR/AP
5. Remotely accessible data
6. Reduces human efforts
7. Automated payments
8. Complete Data security
9. Easy back-up and restoration
10. Faster calculations and pattern recognitions
11. No weariness
12. Boost compliance
13. Cut cost
14. Gain productivity
15. No leave or holidays

Deploying RPA in an organization has visible results of reducing human efforts in various tasks associated with the accounting and finance departments. Managing ample data is really a big issue for humans. AI has been helping accountants to offload their burden on them.

RPA in Finance and Accounting

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) simply means automating repetitive and tedious tasks which usually are time-consuming and inaccurate if performed by humans to get seamless and accurate output from the fed data.

Finance and accounting departments need constant innovation with the growth in the number of businesses and opportunities spreading across the globe. RPA has superseded older business models of finance and accounting and freed the accountants, they now have more transformed job opportunities.

 RPA in finance processes such as:

• Operational accounting that includes billing, account receivables, payments, etc.
• General accounting that includes allocations and adjustments, reconciliations, journal entry processing, etc.
• Treasury processes 
• Planning, budgeting, and forecasting
• Financial and external reporting

However, this sector as a whole is a vast domain to cover all the loopholes but RPA will gradually make it happen all over the industry. So, implementing RPA is the best option for you. But, just implementation will not at all be a maximum benefit it can deliver. Let’s discuss how its implementation in the finance and accounting industry can actually help to drive sustainable growth:-

 Benefit #1: Managing Financial Close

RPA simplifies the accounting and financial close process of your company. It helps you to perform end to end tasks, post journal entries, and manage timelines in a centralized workspace. You can use Financial close automation to plan monthly financial close, create close tasks, prepare and post journal entries in your ERP, monitoring real-time close progress, and external audits.

Benefit #2: Streamline Your Accounts Payable

Robotic process automation (RPA) is increasingly modernizing business payments processing in a relatively accurate manner. Thus, eliminating the possibility of clerical errors that used to be found most commonly in traditional methods of accounting. It automatically categorizes and sort invoices in different formats and reduces human efforts. From sorting and categorization to the final payment of all invoices is done effortlessly and accurately to avoid any loss. Although, it used to be done manually before the task was evidently an ordeal. Managing payables in a smaller business unit is not that tough but today, almost all companies have a large clientele and loads of data to save, sort, retrieve, and manage. Thus, bots are like automated colleagues helping you complete your task with many hands.

Benefit #3: Conquering Account Receivables

To maintain a healthy cash flow in your business, you need proper management of AR. Inefficient generation of invoices and delays can cause your business to suffer a great loss. Implementing RPA not only ensures accuracy but also saves time. Manual efforts are thus reduced to take other projects to work on.

Benefit #4: Controlled Risk

Implementation of RPA ensures safety from various risk and fraudulent activities by working simultaneously on all past and present transaction data from the company’s system.

Benefit #5: Simplifies Reporting and Analytics

Robotic process automation enables quick report generation on the basis of aggregated information from various sources. Robots can gather appropriate data and can easily generate reports in no time. This workload is unquestionably massive and repetitive, but RPA is the perfect solution to it. It will significantly monitor processes, reports, and query handling instantly.

Analytical robots manage customer service, support processes, and workflow structuring in a well-organized and competent way by providing a thorough analysis of the client’s data and automate solutions or redirect them to the relevant department.

Integrating RPA with the ERP system, organizations can automate data analytics. So copying and pasting data can be easily automated. Further robots analyze the data, process the results using predefined parameters and send the summary to the respective departments. This ensures working in an organized manner.

Benefit #6: Internal Audit and Compliance

RPA can support internal audits to boost productivity and increase its risk coverage. By doing more with less it significantly lessens the ongoing compliance burden. RPA introduces both responsibility and opportunity for internal audits.

“RPA can automate 45% of human tasks in the accounting and finance sector, which could save approx. $2 trillion in worldwide workforce costs.”

Challenges in the Implementation of RPA

Robotic process automation is rapidly transforming the universe by providing automated solutions and changes in almost all sectors. To name a few healthcare, banking, finance and accounting industry, insurance, travel, and most of the things of our day-to-day life. RPA ensures optimized results, advancement in the working style, and opportunity to learn and develop new skills to use it and put more focus on the work.

But, every innovation in technology has to face a number of challenges before it actually comes on the front. Companies looking forward to deploying these innovations need to have the approach and technique to overcome those challenges.

• First and the major issue orbiting this idea is Employee Resistance and onboarding. Of course, if you are planning to recruit robots as your employees, you must ensure that you have smart enough staff who are skilled with the artificial workforce and can manage their time schedule to work with and in the new system.
• Implementing RPA involves massive data entry and data migration jobs to put all processes to automation. This is necessary for accurate operations in the data.
• Depending upon the size of your business, the deployment of RPA involves the management of responsibilities at all levels. So initially, every process should have a concerned person to handle it.
• If you are looking forward to automating your business fully, you should have a skilled team having the knowledge to work with the latest innovation.
• Deploying RPA has numerous benefits, but initial implementation is not economical.
• Choosing the right type of automation for your industry is a very crucial and common challenge. You should be very clear and knowledgeable about it. Investing in the wrong RPA can lead you towards a big loss.
• RPA driven business needs regular maintenance of the software for continual efficiency which, therefore, should not be neglected.

Adopting RPA is not a choice in today’s world, but a need! The latest advancement is occupying all sectors and hence speeding up the processes and revenue growth.

Implementation of RPA in the accounting and finance industry is not a tough deal as it may seem, but make sure to standardize processes before its implementation. Basic functions in F&A that benefit from RPA involve Accounting & Reporting, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Budgeting & Forecasting, Expense Management, Tax, Treasury Management, Internal Audit & Compliance, and Payroll. RPA is a boon to this industry. For e.g., Accounts payable demands repetitive work that robots can handle without getting weary.

In today’s technology-driven world, approx. 50%-90% accounting processes are automated but still, you are able to find some gaps where the tasks and activities between the systems such as logging into the suppliers portal, entering or reentering data from one application to another, and manual updating of data from spreadsheets. Therefore, there is a severe need to mind all the gaps we probably can find using the smart digital workforce - RPA.

What’s next?

New “bots” are created to work in harmony with the physical creatures. RPA unitedly is the ability of a robot to compute massive data instantly and the human brain to analyze, conceptualize, and think creatively. To name a few out of various, bots are assigned multiple tasks of accounts payables and accounts receivables such as:-

Tasks Performed By Bots for Accounts Payables

• Capturing and extracting data
• Executing customer-defined business processes
• Matching invoices, PO, and receivables
• Automating payments using various payment gateways
• Instant access to archived data and other documents

 Tasks Performed By Bots for Accounts Receivables

• Capturing and extracting data
• Invoice creation with option to link other supported documents
• Workflow with the execution of customer-defined business rules
• Retrieval of open invoices from the customer’s website
• Capturing remittance information to apply cash after matching payments to invoices
• Automates presentment for receivables
• Instant access to archived information and other documents

Will RPA Replace Humans Permanently?

To a great extent robot in every industry has certainly replaced humans and reduced human efforts. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Robotic Process Automation are disruptions in every sector bringing a new change and ample positive benefits.

Although the tech-disruption happening on the planet is bringing a drastic turn and novelty in businesses, the fact here is that humans can be freed from their tedious and mundane tasks in any organization but very clearly they cannot be completely superseded by machines. Robots/software are just programmed devices or programs installed and created by humans.

Therefore, man is needed at one end of any artificial intelligence. The superpower today is certainly designed, created, installed, and executed by the human brain. The reality is ‘bots’ are accurate in interpreting massive data and can be the fastest of any human beings in producing error-free outputs.

AI is meant to perform tasks that can be time-consuming for humans. Evidently, natural intelligence has a lot more capacity and potential and hence is fairly using artificial intelligence to interpret his work.       

Final Words

RPA is gaining popularity day by day, the first thing to keep in mind before going further towards it is that without the complete knowledge of this tech-disruption happening across the globe, you won’t be able to get its absolute advantage.

To get the most out of RPA in your accounting business you have to figure out all the challenges you could face in deploying it and work further on how you can overcome those issues.

Automation with Robots is definitely a good choice to speed up your business and gather a remarkable growth.

Specially designed software made bookkeeping a simple task which previously was no less than a headache. Automating certain accounting duties gives you the opportunity to work, think, and act smart.

Choose the software that best matches your organizational requirements and would prove to be a fruitful investment for you. The accounting sectors, as well as individual accountants, now embrace the best cloud accounting software to make the F&A processes smoother, safe, fast, secure, accurate, reliable, error-free, and more productive. If not instantly, RPA will gradually skyrocket your business to a higher level and would make you stand, prevail, and progress in this competitive world.