Accounting is one of the few departments where RPA is most easily applied. Accounting processes are in a very convenient structure for RPA with their repetitive structure within the framework of a certain rule. Accounting processes are generally the best-defined processes in a company, and the stages, approval chain and steps are the most obvious. In addition, it is one of the departments where the time and cost savings of having these processes done by robots are most easily noticed, and you can easily realize the return on your investment. Therefore, in cases where you say “I want to progress with RPA in my digital transformation journey, but I can’t decide from which process to start”, our first
suggestion will always be accounting. The way RPA is used depends on your existing processes and imagination. However, we have compiled the following examples for the use of RPA in accounting to give you an idea.
Invoice Processing
The purchases made by the company, or the expenditures made by the employee must be checked and entered the system and recorded in the accounting after they are approved. This process often takes up a lot of employee work time, as it is prone to human error and often requires manual verification. Thanks to the optical character recognition technique (OCR), Voodoo RPA can read the data from the photos of the invoices and receipts or from the scanner images and transfer them to the place where it should be in the system. Then, it matches the desired flow, provides the necessary controls, and finalizes the accounting transactions.
Payments
Payments are one of the riskiest transactions in accounting. Using RPA, these transactions can be managed within certain rules. For example, employee salaries can be paid on a regular schedule in line with current data from human resources. By creating approval processes with RPA robots, it is possible to pay the company’s purchases or employee expenses quickly and regularly.
Monthly and Annual Closings
We didn’t see accountant who smile face when end of month and end of year came. These are usually the busiest times. Ledger, reconciliations, debts, receivables, banks… There are a thousand kinds of manual and repetitive jobs in the accounting department that require an expert hand. Downloading financial statements from accounting programs to Excel, reporting formats, comparison with the previous period, conversion to a common currency in case of consolidation of accounts… Didn’t you have a headache? Frankly, we had a headache while writing this blog, but our accounting department does not have such a problem because they facilitate all these processes with RPA. By simply downloading the data and reconstructing it according to a certain rule, we saved a lot of professional accountant’s time.
Audit Process
The company must go through the audit process both for its own internal audit and in order to provide the data that must be legally reported to the independent auditors. In this context, the compliance of all financial statements and processes of the company with laws and internal procedures should be transparently audited. With the use of RPA in accounting processes, the role of the auditor will be transformed from one that collects, organizes, analyzes, and publishes data to a one-time role that establishes the procedure and teaches the robot how to do these operations.
