Industry Specifics: RPA & F&A

Though perhaps not an industry in and of itself, finance and accounting deserves a special focus when it comes to robotic process automation. No matter what kind of work you do, every organization, business and non-profit alike, needs to pay their employees and usually their suppliers. As long as money is exchanging hands, there’s probably room for automation to make things more efficient.

F&A is the quintessential back-office work that keeps a business running. It doesn’t get a lot of attention from the CEO, because it’s so essential to the everyday flow of the organization. But at least when it comes to accounts payable (AP), the savings gained through RPA could be significant enough to turn any executive’s head.

The biggest concern to be addressed here by RPA is the level of error and inaccuracy, especially for invoices. When you’re dealing with money, a small mistake can have big ramifications. Every incorrect invoice ends up costing the organization more money on top of what was projected. RPA eliminates the possibility of human error, and it can take over the job of matching invoice sums to orders.

If, for example, you were using UiPath’s Desktop automation software, you would simply create a workflow that would match the invoice (digital or scanned) to a company order and approve correct amounts. Don’t worry; the software robots can read numbers through advanced OCR technology. Any invoices that don’t match can be flagged for human attention – or, if that doesn’t significantly lighten the workload, you can set up other checks and scripted communication with the vendor.

Even with good vendor relationships, there are bound to be contract leaks without a consistent system in place to check contract to order to invoice. It’s a tedious human task to check and double-check invoice numbers, but it’s a prime task for RPA. If an extra charge shows up without an invoice, a human employee might not have the time to check it against the pre-approved spending order.

Contract leakage is pretty common, but what if you could eliminate it altogether with RPA? Let the rules-based robots handle the numbers and the actual exchange of dollars (under close supervision, of course). These tasks don’t really need the uniquely human skills of creative problem solving or big-picture thinking. Free up your F&A people to tackle more interesting questions and challenges.

Explore how RPA can revolutionize your F&A processes and keep money you didn’t even know you were losing. Download your free trial of UiPath today and let us show you what RPA can do.