Executive Summary:
Cevitr was brought in to help our client manage the reconciliation of their payments. This process was previously looked after by our client’s team but was proving to be time-consuming. Cevitr built a process to manage the reconciliation of bank statements and journals.
Client/Organization Overview:
Our client operates 12 prestigious hotels in the UK and Ireland and is a leading hotel management company.
The Challenge:
Adyen is a payment provider that allows the hotels to accept card payments from guests. This was previously a manual process where our client received a report of the payments that were received and a bank statement report. They would post a journal into their reporting system, NAV, listing a summary. Following this, they needed to reconcile the journal vs the bank statement, ensuring the two reconcile and sum to zero. The reports sometimes lack reference numbers for some transactions, so completing the task manually was challenging and involved an element of guesswork, and checking the last few digits of the payment card to ensure they matched the correct payments. This was made even more difficult when transactions occur near the cutoff of the Adyen report or bank statement, causing a transaction to be on one day’s Adyen report, and the next day’s bank statement.
The Solution:
Cevitr’s digital worker ‘Jo’ was brought in to reconcile the bank statements vs journals. This involves comparing payment amounts, last 3 card number digits, and transaction codes to ensure both sides match. Alongside the output log, our AI powered digital worker reports on any missing payments. Where any payments are missing, our RPA digital worker will keep a log of them until the payment has been matched. Our client receives a daily report of the transactions and can manually go into NAV and match missing transactions if they wish; otherwise, Cevitr’s digital worker will continue trying to match the payments. This makes the reconciling task much more straightforward, and the client can focus on the exceptions. This automation also means the client has an audit trail they can use to track first-time-right rates and identify where discrepancies occur.
Results:
Our digital worker processes up to 80 transactions per hotel per day, which means there’s close to 1,000 records processed each day. Posting the journals is also simplified for the client, as there are several different payment and transaction types that require different calculations to generate the journal. Our RPA powered digital worker reports the SDRs (Settlement Detail Reports) and PARs (Payment Activity Reports) that he processes, along with their statuses any discrepancies. This also helps identify issues with hotels if there is consistently information missing from a particular hotel, to ensure the correct systems are in place. These reports are sent to the central team, and filtered reports are also sent to each hotel.
Conclusion:
This is a great use case for automation – our digital worker is freeing staff from a monotonous, repetitive, error-prone task. Our AI powered digital worker handles this process with speed and accuracy. It also future-proofs our client's business, as it eliminates the risk of experience/efficiency being lost if the responsible staff member leaves, is on holiday, or is on sick leave.