Introduction
Never before has there been more tools at the disposal of finance departments to assist them not only enhance their own function but to improve their organisation’s finance as a whole.
This paper will focus on how businesses can enhance their finance processes by identifying areas ripe for automation and more specifically, how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to reduce payment fraud. In addition, best practise methodologies for implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate rules-based human tasks through software robots that provide businesses with scalability, increased security and governance in all areas of the organisation.
What makes for a good RPA opportunity?
The table below gives a point score for various aspects that need to be considered and the highest scoring processes are where you should start.
Accounts Payable – What can a Bot do?
- Read an invoice
- Capture invoice into ERP
- Reconcile vendor statements
- Create payments
- Manage and process credit notes
- Vendor master management
- Process Requisition
- Load Purchase order
- Process Goods Receipt
- Reconcile banks
- Reporting
- Perform 3Way Matching
- Upload Bank Payments
- Vendor query responses
Finance & Accounting – Record to Report
- Monthly close processes
- Financial consolidations
- General Ledger functions
- Journal entry processing
- Mass journal uploads
- Inter-company accounting and invoicing
Finance & Accounting – HR & Payroll
- Read expense claims
- Process expense claims
- Employee onboarding and offboarding
- Payroll management
- Payroll recons
Finance & Accounting – Receivable
- Create Sales order
- Customer master management
- Sending customer statements
- Customer statement reconciliation
- Debtors allocation from bank statement
- Reporting
Finance & Accounting – Treasury
- Bank statement download and format conversion and item classification
- Bank statement captured into ERP (Cashbook)
- Bank Recons
- Deal confirmation matching
- Send deal tickets
- Reporting
- Interest and FX rates capturing
Network & IT
- Active directory management
- Server/Application monitoring and alert management
- Service desk – create tickets, close tickets etc
- Notification and escalation
- Data and file management and maintenance
- Integration (API, FTP)
- Data migration
Finance & Accounting – Supply Chain
- Document checking
- Document verification
- Shipment status updates
How To Deploy RPA Successfully
Determine Objectives
- Cost savings
- Time savings/productivity
- Reduction in risk
- Improve scalability
Quantify the size of the business case
- Process discovery
Determine your appetite
- Dip your toes
- Land and expand
- Digital transformation
Choose an experienced partner
- Partner must have an experienced technology footprint
- All RPA consultants must be certified on the RPA technology
- Partner must work with best in class automation software
- Partner must be local and should provide a free POC and should provide local support for the RPA implementation
