This document discusses how robotic process automation (RPA) can benefit finance and accounting departments. It notes that RPA can automate repetitive, mundane tasks like data entry, transaction processing, and reporting to free up employees to focus on more complex work. Specific processes that can be automated include journal entries, account reconciliation, invoice processing, order book creation, and tax operations. The document also lists some major RPA service providers and barriers to implementation, as well as strategies for overcoming those barriers.

1. RPA FOR
FINANCE AND
ACCOUNTING
TRIVIKRAMAN S

2. INTRODUCTION
1. RPA is rapidly becoming a trend to extend automation in finance/accounting. According to recent researches,
several enterprises accepted that RPA provided a significant influence on shifting the financial processes in order-
to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report to the next level.
2. Accounting team is an invaluable asset for a business. As the enterprise grows, it is hard to scale the department
to meet the rising demand. In addition, the finance and accounting industry include an excess of transactional
processes, which are repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming. According to a research of McKinsey, finance
includes around 43% of technical potential to be automated.
3. Robotic automation allows the industry to handle these processes with ease and free up the team members to
focus on complex and higher-level tasks. It also reduces another challenge of the workforce called inaccuracy as
it leads to substantial losses. The implementation of RPA platform in the finance and accounting companies
automates processes like transactional data management, accounting, billings, journal entry processing,
adjustments, account receivables, collections, etc., efficiently, seamlessly and with 100% accuracy.
4. As a result, the completely repetitive data entry tasks, as well as tracking of millions of routine transactions, will
not demand considerable effort and time of an employee. Along with that, it also handles financial budgeting,
reporting, forecasting, planning, and other treasury tasks.

3. USE CASES
1.Journal Entry Automation
A journal entry is one of the labor-intensive work, which takes too much of the time. As
there are no validation checks in spreadsheets, the manual handling includes high
possibilities of error occurrence. RPA solution reduces the potential risk and ensures
accurate end results.
2.Account Reconciliation
This process checks the account balance of the accounts at certain intervals. This labor-
intensive process includes steps like comparing account balance with various systems,
verifying statements & reports to examine discrepancies if any and takes actions to
correct the same. RPA bots can simplify these laborious works and increase the month
end closing process.

4. USE CASES
3.Invoice Processing:
Auto-extract, auto-classify, and auto-validate data from an invoice or utility bill with
intelligent document processing. Use human in the loop verification only for checking the
exception occurrences or below threshold level confidence level, which are clearly auto-
marked for verification. Auto-assimilate the extracted data in the ERP system by using
RPA.
4.Order Book Creation
Auto-ingest data from the purchase orders received from customers, through different
modes, in to the core systems by using intelligent document processing. Use this data to
auto-create sales order and order books on a periodic basis by using RPA and workflow.

5. USE CASES
5.Improved Financial Reporting
Providing the decision-makers in the company with accurate information is vital, and that
information flow requires accurate and detailed reporting. With robots handling more of
the mundane finance tasks in the office, employees can devote additional time to
producing the deep data insights necessary for making smart choices.
6.Tax Operations:
RPA provisions data from internal and external sources to support tax accounting, tax
filings, and calculation of sales and use taxes.

6. RPA SERVICE PROVIDERS
•UiPath
•Automation Anywhere
•Blue Prism
•Work Fusion
•Kofax
•DATAMATICS
•NICE
•Automation Edge
•Kryon

7. ILLUSTRATION-UIPATH

8. BARRIERS FOR
IMPLEMENTATION
•Lack of RPA expertise/skills.
•Insufficient budget.
•Lack of resources.
•Limited cost savings/benefits.
•Organizational/employee resistance.
•Security concerns.

9. OVERCOMING BARRIERS
•Preferring no code platforms
•Preferring platforms with simple interface
•Choosing cloud RPA over on-premises RPA can also result in more savings, removing
capital and maintenance expenses.
•Considering a provider that offers a program that validates and certifies the bots offered
by the company and its partners to adhere to the highest standards for protection.
•Being transparent and allowing all employees irrespective of their expertise to know
about it.

10. CONCLUSION
Robotic process automation has advanced significantly since its original introduction to the
business world. Today, it has an integral role to play within a broader strategy of automation.
When you properly configure and deploy them, RPA and related tools can translate into
significant time and cost savings for business.

11. THANK YOU
.