You may be asking, “Why should our finance department adopt digital workers?” Well, we have the skinny on that!
Did you know the concept of leveraging Robotics Process Automation originated within the realm of finance operations?
Data reconciliation and validation, as well as data entry operations, where accuracy is of the utmost importance, are the center pieces found in RPA use cases. Organizations adopted digital workers to assist with processing orders, paying the bills, and expediting accounts receivable functions.
The operational activities among finance departments that RPA can support are the following:
- Customer Onboarding
- Accounts Payable & Receivable
- Fraud Prevention
- Compliance & Reporting
- Transaction Processing
- Investment Management
- Reconciliation
- DSO Outstanding
- Credit Checks
- Remittance
- Foreign Exchange
- Data Management
- Dividend Management
- Reporting
- Loan, Credit Card & Mortgage Applications
- Auditing
- Write-offs
- Debt Management
- Accounting Journal Entries
- Collections
- Service Desk
- Notice to Close
- Internet Application Processing
- Quote Through to Pay
- Procurement Management
- Partner Management
- Accrual Booking
- Financial Close Management
The nature of activities performed by most finance departments requires extreme accuracy and it’s highly transactional. Finance activities such as account reconciliations, journal entries, and even 10-key data entry are manually based and require heavy quality control reviews to ensure accuracy. A human being’s level of detail and accuracy at 100% is almost impossible to achieve.
RPA and the advent of digital workers altered the landscape for finance professionals across all industries.
Forbes Magazine published a list of high-level use cases with the most significant impact on organizations’ operational budget by deploying digital workers – and the winners are:
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Risk / Fraud Management: Combine past and present transaction data from organizational systems to flag potentially fraudulent activities.
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Reporting: Aggregate data from various sources like email, organization systems, and databases, and automatically generate reports based on standard rules.
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Transaction Processing: Automate pre- and post-payment validation and reconciliation, notify exceptions, monitor and identify potential duplicate payments, and automatically transfer pending payment requests into a suspense account to prohibit withdrawal.
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Collections: Automatically receive and post payments, send dunning letters, create reminder reports and a shortlist of customers to call, and automatically allocate work to collectors.
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Financial Close: Post data from multiple sources to sub-ledgers.
Source: forbes.com
