RPA in Finance: Innovative Use Cases

IBM is building the industry’s most comprehensive suite of AI-powered Automation capabilities. With IBM Robotic Process Automation, financial services firms like Credigy Solutions can automate more business and IT tasks at scale with the ease and speed of traditional RPA. Software robots, or bots, can act on AI insights to complete tasks with no lag time and accelerate digital transformation. When it comes to business trips, RPA bots can facilitate lots of manual work for both travelers and accountants, creating a better employee experience. Another promising application point for RPA in finance and accounting is intercompany reconciliations.

Managing debt and investments are important aspects of financial administration and involve the strategic supervision of an organization’s financial resources. Effective treasury management (particularly with the addition of business automation and AI) helps your company maximize liquidity and enhances your financial performance. Use AI-powered automation to implement innovative accounting practices, take over cumbersome reporting functions, and manage your business’s policies and procedures. Decision makers get perspective to make quick decisions on budgets, forecasts, strategies, and governance. Accessing and managing credit is a crucial, time-consuming aspect of your business, and it needs to run smoothly.

What is the Future of RPA in Finance?

Making purchase orders is a mundane yet indispensable activity that takes a large amount of staff’s time. AI-powered software robots can be trained to scan orders for critical data, make the respective inputs in the system, and establish approval requests. RPA can be used to scan regulatory announcements for future changes, to catch changes early, or to access the latest updates as new information is released, in real-time.

Humans can be dead-serious regarding work, but making mistakes is part of being a human. Numbers are essential to Finance, and even if a single digit goes wrong- an entire system could go haywire. That’s not the case with RPA bots; they run according to established rules, deliver higher quality, and substantiate financial success. RPA bots are scalable and can be called forward to manage high data volumes and answer a massive influx of queries in record times. RPA helps remove these human inconsistencies and enables you to deliver accurate results while consistently ensuring data compilation.

What are the primary processes in the finance department?

With Blueprint, you virtually eliminate that risk because you can connect dependencies to specific process steps. By leveraging RPA, accounting and finance departments can streamline invoice processing, resulting in saved time and money, and increased accuracy. In doing so, invoice processing is accelerated, preventing potentially costly errors and avoiding financial penalties for late or incomplete payments. HPE has faced challenges that include varying bank statement formats, multiple languages and missing information that compound the work of accounts receivables analysts, Singh said. In response, his team has developed an RPA workflow that uses fuzzy logic to improve data identification and machine learning to avoid repeating previous posting errors.

• By automating this task, you will get a consistent cash flow without deficiencies.
• In the financial industry, some tasks can rely on robots to a great extent; others cannot be automated with the available technologies.
• Effective administration requires tracking and analyzing cashflow, forecasting, and implementing techniques and strategies.
• Robotic process automation in finance helps organizations identify and track such accounts and timely close them.
• With RPA you can bill customers for your goods and services not only faster but in a way that is more reliable and efficient.

When data varies too much from what’s expected, or the robot grades its own confidence on the lower end of the scale, it can flag an invoice for manual user review. Outside of these cases, you can dramatically reduce the number of “touches” each invoice requires. “The quickest wins have been more rules-based processes that are more amenable to RPA,” said Dennis Gannon, vice president rpa use cases in finance of advisory services at Gartner. Gartner for Finance provides insights, advice and tools to help finance leaders make the right decisions to drive business results. Understand the right places to deploy finance robotics, proven methods for tracking and assessing its benefits, and techniques for handling the integration of finance robotics with team design and structure.

automationfinanceRobotic Process Automation

Both activities involve gathering data inputs, formatting the data and aggregating them in an easy-to-understand format for all stakeholders. 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. Happily, these challenges are only applicable if you decide to build RPA solutions in-house. All modern RPA platforms offer solutions that solve both data extraction and system integration issues.

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. Our prebuilt automations and ready-to-go connectors can give you a head start on a more innovative future for finance and accounting.

Top 15 RPA Use Cases & Examples in Banking in 2023

Each invoice is validated against the defined data fields to extract and store the information. You can also configure it to separate invoices based on vendor, client, location, etc. It also cross-checks documents to verify whether the payments made are accurate. Next, list all the repetitive, manual & high-volume functions based on their complexity. A recent study by Deloitte even suggests that 52.8% of professionals seek to improve and enhance business operations by leveraging automation and analytics in the accounting processes.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you unlock the power of robotics process automation and improve your operations. As much as we try to push finance towards models with a solid strategic, analytical, and decision-making component, we still have to deal with an immense amount of daily paperwork and tedious, dehumanizing tasks. Fortunately, most of these processes, such as manual data entry and transaction recording, are repetitive and rule-based. Therefore, robotic process automation (RPA) can successfully manage them, partially or completely. Many banks and financial service providers have adopted RPA to automate these report-generating operations.

Manage in-house bank accounts

RPA completely automates the data entry for financial transactions like payroll and journal entries. With this tech at work, financial companies can be confident in the accuracy of their records and save valuable time that would be otherwise spent on tedious work. The processing of invoices can challenge the employees, especially if those invoices vary drastically by format. Robotic process automation in finance can unburden back-office staff since robots streamline repetitive and rule-based assignments. Like multiple other tasks connected with document processing, mortgage lending is severely time-consuming.

Receiving goods and services is an important process to confirm that goods or services purchased have been received or completed following a purchase agreement or purchase order. This confirmation is then used to support the 3-way invoice matching process to authorize payment to the vendor. Transform paperwork into robot work, and watch how customer, partner, and employee experiences improve. Automate quarterly cashflow forecasting for ongoing and new projects, improve collections, and reduce day sales outstanding by using RPA bots.

How to Use RPA in Finance? Use Cases and Real-World Examples

Get faster access to the data you need to make smarter decisions that make a difference. Track the payment status related to the usage of the leased assets in the business system. Clients receive 24/7 access to proven management and technology research, expert advice, benchmarks, diagnostics and more. Improving digital competency in finance is essential to get the most out of the broad transformation that is taking place, yet most training is currently inadequate. Learn what your peers have to say about reducing cost, minimizing effort, and improving speed and accuracy with RPA. And if you feel like your business will benefit from an RPA solution, don’t forget to check out our data-driven list of RPA vendors.