9 Applications of RPA in the accounting department

Your accounting department probably has more than enough work to do, maybe even too much work, all crucial to the operation of the company. If you want to get some relief, give your accounting department some breathing space and free up some time, RPA is a leap into a future where this can be a reality.

In general you can increase capacity by 35-50%, realize 25-50% in savings, often get 100% data accuracy and slash processing times by 30-50%. All of this with a 6-12 month ROI. Almost sounds too good to be true, right?

Let’s look into 9 specific cases where your accounting department can take advantage from the aforementioned benefits of RPA.

Vendor onboarding and maintenance

Gathering the documents and data to set up a company as an approved vendor in order to qualify, approve, and contract vendors, make purchases and pay on time. All of this can take a lot of time collecting the data, inputting it in the relevant software programs and possibly do some further manual processing in the software itself.

Account Receivable and vendor portal queries

More and more companies are introducing proprietary self-service web portals in order to access information regarding order, invoices, receipts, status updates and more. Managing and checking all these different disconnected portals with a lot of manual steps to submit invoices in order to get paid is a cumbersome process. An RPA robot can log in to these portals at a scheduled time, gather the necessary information and documents and submit this data to the portal.

Customer onboarding and maintenance

Onboarding customers and updating your CRM, complying with regulation and making sure the client understands the service available to them.

Accounts Payable

Processing and reviewing transactions between your company and suppliers. This often includes recording important data into your company’s financial, or, bookkeeping system. After which it goes through your specific business process. This whole process is straightforward but might be very tiresome. To avoid human error during data entry, losing invoices and preventing invoice duplicates an RPA robot can be deployed to reduce the burden.

Pricing Comparisons

To prepare customer quotes, you might have to go through large lists of suppliers’ prices to compare them and determine the best price available to you. An RPA robot can do this in no time for you.

Sales and purchase order processing

Placing orders with suppliers for a certain good or service and receiving orders from customers. Both of these often result in a complex chain of communications that involves a lot of the company’s departments. There are most likely a lot of manual steps during this complex process that an RPA robot can automatically do for you.

Collections

Unfortunately not everyone pays their invoices on time, following up on overdue invoices and all the related processing can be relieved by scheduling some of these tasks to be done by an RPA robot.

application rpa accountancy

Report aggregation

Financial data aggregation can be a very difficult task, collecting data from multiple incompatible sources and platforms. With an RPA robot you can make this process a lot faster and more reliable so that your reporting process gets more transparent and more accurate.

Journal postings

Entering manual journals into your ERP system or systems is probably one of the most common and time consuming processes in your accounting department. This can get especially stressful during monthly closing. Again a carefully integrated RPA robot can provide a huge relief during these periods.

Besides these general cases there are many more specific use cases depending on your business processes, ERP systems and workflows, they will surface naturally during the RPA introduction process.

Feel free to contact us or book a call to see how we can relieve your accounting department as much as possible.

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