RPA use cases in Accounts Receivable, payable and Finance

By Staff Writer

Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable

Accounts payable and accounts receivable represents vital line items on an organization’s balance sheet. For most businesses, there are loads of data to track and record in the workflow of payment and receiving, such as the actual payment made by a client, recording journal entries at the end of the month, approvals, etc.

For maximum output and seamless operation, AP and AR management requires multiplerepetitive, rules-based tasksthat demand accuracy, adherence to timeline, and consistency as they are the fundamentals of financial audits. RPA can be employed in different processes for different clients and vendors, routing orders, processing payments and receipts, sending notifications for late-payments etc.

Vendor management

Vendor management is one of the building blocks of Accounts Payable.Large companies such as Apple,Samsung, have upwards of 76,000 suppliers, with different and distinct credit rules and payment processes. Due to this workload, vendor management is put in place to ensure that all the invoices are properly paid to the appropriate vendor in time and as per the agreed terms. RPA comes in handy when setting uppayment processes for vendors ensuring, consistent on-time invoice processing and adherence to the contractual payment terms.

Invoice management

Processing an invoice can take a company between 4 to 16 days, right from payment to the approval phase.  In most organizations, approximately 76 percent of the of invoicing task requires manual input.This createsan opportunity for companies to introduce efficiency by automating invoice management with RPA. RPA can be used to extract data via OCR, send notifications, monitor receipts, perform reconciliations,and register invoices, etc all within minutes.

Here are a few common use cases, where RPA can help replace manual repetitive tasks within organizations.

Financial Planning and Analysis

• Loading balances into planning systems for recording.
• Generate variance report that displays pre-population and actuals.
• Use historical and market data to connect the pre-population of forecasts.

Regulatory Compliance and Reporting

RPA can significantly cut costs and associated risks by simplifying the compliance and reporting process. Automation can be used to;

• Create audit trails and get confirmation reports.
• Support auto-generated regulatory reports by capturing and manipulating relevant data.

Standard Journal Entries

RPA can be used to automate collection of data from various sources, and organize them for entry into disparite ERP applications.Automationcan also be used to:

• Create monthly journal articles.
• Ensure accurate entries by automatically performing validation checks.

Conclusion

Leveraging software robots in your finance and accounting departments enables you to comprehensively manage high-volume processes across complex IT applications.  An ideal RPA implementationneeds to emphasize on streamlining yourfirm’stedious, repetitive, manual processes, and create an automation center of excellence that ensures that you’re managing your automation investments wisely, enabling you to operate and monitor your initiatives efficiently.