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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been used widely in finance for many years, offering businesses greater efficiency, productivity, and control over their financial procedures. According to recent research, approximately four-fifths of finance leaders in business have implemented, or intend to implement, RPA - particularly as Artificial Intelligence (AI) increase the capability of RPA to deliver effective finance management solutions. 

RPA in finance utilise software bots to process and manage manual tasks that would, typically, be repetitive or time-consuming in nature if completed by a human, such as invoice processing, bank reconciliation, compliance reporting, journal processing, or any data entry tasks on computer-based applications. RPA is part of the wider automation landscape that is gradually streamlining common business processes, with advances in RPA shifting towards more end-to-end process handling instead of simply replicating parts of the human process. 

 

Finance managers are right to be wary of technological fads that come and go so, if you’re considering implementing an RPA solution in your department, how useful is it likely to be? 

 

Typically, the administrative work in any finance department is repetitive and time-consuming, so RPA will drive down the costs that are associated with manually intensive tasks and maintain a high degree of operational productivity throughout the working day. ‘Digital workers’ can retrieve and assimilate data from different back-office systems, complete accurate reconciliations, and instigate actions to resolve problems automatically. Tools, such as advanced Optical Character Recognition, enable RPA to read the text on invoices, create summaries and enter it into ERP/financial systems and send them to the correct team for processing, alleviating staff of time-consuming manual tasks. 

 

Detecting and preventing fraud is a priority for financial departments, who need effective tools to quickly and accurately identify crime using: 

• Due diligence checks 

• Sanctions screening 

• Transaction monitoring 

 

RPA improves the speed and accuracy of fraud detection, so immediate action may be taken to prevent money from illicitly being siphoned from a business’s accounts. Digital workers can autonomously check that data adheres to financial standards, while being programmed to assess any variations in data and unpick the reasons why these may have occurred. Where suspected fraud is detected, this is quickly flagged to the appropriate team. 

 

With RPA, finance teams can create up-to-date financial statements and reports as often as necessary, even daily if required, enabling business leaders to make informed decisions with live data to hand. End-of-month statements, which can take many days or weeks to compile manually, can be created in minutes with RPA, with fast reconciliation and consolidation of transaction records or the aggregation of all relevant data about a business’s financial performance. Freed from the manual task of compiling reports, finance staff can focus on performing data deep dives to obtain a more insightful understanding of the business’s financial position to support smarter decision-making. 

 

Financial management demands a fine attention to detail to ensure a business or institution remains compliant. Human errors are impossible to avoid, but RPA in the finance industry significantly improves accuracy by eradicating mistakes which can prove costly. RPA consolidates data from back-office systems and documents, thereby streamlining the manual processes associated with reporting, and can even identify the data that an auditor will require and stores it conveniently for review and decision-making. 

 

If you’re seeking cost-effective and useful ways to increase productivity and efficiency in your organisation’s financial department, get in touch with Cevitr today to find out more about our RPA solutions for the finance sector.