Discover how robotic process automation (RPA) can empower your organization to delegate time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks to robots while elevating employees to focus on more strategic, higher-value tasks.
Originally published in H1 2019 NAVUG Magazine
Multichannel capture and workflow technologies have gone a long way in helping accounting firms and finance departments across many industries make data work for their businesses and not against them.
With financial process automation, organizations can now streamline and speed the purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, and record-to-report cycles by capturing and extracting information from any source, automatically routing it into an approval workflow, and transferring information into the system of record. However, although the ERP system is the powerful core of your customers’ financial operations, it has its limitations. Most organizations are still forced to allocate employees to tackle the time-consuming, manual work to process information from third-party sources or to handle those tasks that are unique to their business. Therefore, even if financial process automation has already been implemented, there are likely significant workflow gaps and blind spots that can debilitate decisionmaking and ultimately strain customer and vendor relationships.
Financial Process Automation is Only Part of the Equation
Let’s assume an organization has adopted financial process automation technology and perhaps built service-oriented architectures to enable applications to work together. Even though these systems can acquire data from multiple sources, enhancing and properly delivering the information likely requires some significant IT skills. The challenge is further compounded when dealing with automating processes that span across internal enterprise applications and external partner and customer systems, websites, online services, and so on.
The bottom line: Financial process automation solutions are just not designed to link multiple, disparate internal and external sources to access or integrate data, or the myriad of other manual tasks that are unique to a business.
Further complicating matters is the fact that as a business grows, with more data comes more complexity; it’s easy to revert to adding more resources to address the problems. But there’s a better way than throwing people at the issue or investing in expensive custom development to try to work around the ERP.
Bridge the Process Automation Gaps with RPA
Enter robotic process automation (RPA), a powerful capability that seems purpose-built to bridge the automation gaps in finance and accounting processes. RPA is designed to serve as a complement—not a replacement—to an existing finance and accounting automation workflow and can scale to meet the needs of any size accounting firm or organizational finance department. Because RPA sits on top of an organization’s existing technology, it works well with installed core systems and can be implemented quickly to minimize operational disruption to day-to-day business. RPA uses software robots to mimic specific rule-based actions a person takes while working on a computer (but with 100 percent accuracy) and is ideal for covering those remaining tasks within workflows that have historically been difficult to automate.
User Case: Invoice Processing
A global telecommunications provider received 1,000 pieces of mail every day in AP, mostly invoice-related, and they relied on inefficient, manual processes. Now, dozens of software robots retrieve 9,000 invoices/month from 30 vendor websites and deliver the data to finance systems, ready for processing and payment.
RPA works within enterprise systems, in desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, and across external sources such as websites and web portals, for example, logging into a supplier portal to gather information or copying and entering data between applications. When you consider the entire finance and accounting spectrum, there could be from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of interdependent rules-based tasks that need to be performed in the same order, over and over. This is where RPA shines.
In short, RPA empowers organizations to delegate the time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks to the robots, and elevate employees to focus on more strategic, higher-value tasks. Exactly where RPA is best applied within a particular organization or department will depend on its most pressing current priorities and long-term goals.
User Case: Procure-to-Pay
A premier transportation provider enabled customers to request pick-ups via email; however, CSRs were tasked with manually re-keying shipment details from the 
emails into an internal scheduling application as well as the shipper’s portal. RPA automatically reads emails, extracts details, enters them into the scheduling application, and posts to the shipper’s portal within seconds of the initial email.
Intelligent Automation – Realizing the Promise of True End-to-End Digital Transformation
Often, when you are asked to evaluate your automation priorities, a question emerges: What if I want to extend beyond bridging the manual task gaps in my workflow with RPA and take my processes to the next level of optimization and productivity?
It’s clear that “onboarding” software robots as the digital workforce to handle the repetitive, rules-based tasks that drain critical employee time and brain power continues to prove its value. Yet many organizations are finding that their business operations are becoming increasingly complex due to the vast amounts of unstructured data found in documents and emails, mobile transactions, electronic signatures, exception handling, biometric authentication/validation, case management, and customer communications.
Addressing these process and data complexities require a next-generation, unified intelligent automation platform that bundles analytics and cognitive technologies with RPA to automate more end-to-end processes while driving greater value.
The result is a truly automated process workflow that connects the back office to the front office. Customers are empowered to not only scale, but also to measure the benefits and ROI of their process automation deployment.
Therein lies the real power of an intelligent automation platform: building a digital finance workforce of tomorrow where the collaboration between digital and physical workers results in greater organizational capacity and employee empowerment.