Top 10 Use Cases Of RPA Accounting

RPA (robotic process automation) is like a sword that slices through tedious and repetitive tasks in high volumes for your company. Except, it's not a sword - it's tiny robots performing repetitive and routine tasks so that you can focus on core business functionalities. 

So, whether you're looking to automate the financial auditing statement or you wish to speed up tasks like account receivable and payable, RPA is one of the easiest ways to go about it. You can utilize RPA for plenty of purposes.

To learn more, let's look at the top 10 RPA accounting use cases.

‍1. Accounts receivable 

The major thing that RPA focuses on, when it comes to accounts receivable, is Days Sales Outstanding. DSO often tackles the complications of human elements on both sides (recipient and payee's side).  The fluctuations in the DSO can harm the bottom line of the business to a large extent. 

Let's take an example to understand the DSO better. If your accountant fails to send an invoice, it leads to a cash gap in the business which in turn impacts the business liquidity and the whole cash process. 

By using the RPA for your business, you can automate the invoice process. RPA makes the process of managing multiple systems effective and smooth. You can automate numerous business functions like customer data setup and management, credit risk management, invoice generation, and much more. 

2. Accounts payable 

Thanks to the intelligent automation of RPA, it can help you effectively manage the whole DSO process. As mentioned above, RPA can help you improve the cash flow in your business. This increased cash flow improves the business operations to a large extent. 

Some of the major benefits of RPA in account payable include vendor invoice processing, vendor setup, and verification, monitoring duplicates, preparing, and at the same time performing payments. All in all, RPA in account payable assists you in ensuring that you don't pay extra that can harm your cash flow. 

‍3. Financial forecasting & planning 

Among other RPA accounting use cases, financial planning and forecasting are one of the major benefits. With RPA, you can load your balances to the planning systems. Moreover, you can create variance reports with the help of the intelligence automation tool. 

Whether it's about preparing a file or preparing a compliance report, you need human intervention to complete the whole taxation workflow . However, equipped with modern AI & ML technology, RPA is effectively used to manage multiple finance processes. 

‍4. Financial reporting 

For any business to thrive in the competitive market, it's vital to manage and monitor the whole financial process of your business. To make this happen, businesses need to focus on preparing the profit and loss reports and that too on a regular basis. This helps businesses to know how well they are performing and getting results. 

One of the best ways to deal with the hassles of preparing a profit and loss report is using rpa accounting. What's more, the modern platform prepares the reports in real-time.  

Some of the key roles of RPA in financial reporting include preparing P&L reports, variance analysis, financial close processes, income statements, trial balance sheets, and much more. The best part about using RPA is that it can complete the whole process without spending extra time. 

5. Intercompany reconciliations (ICR)

Next, Intercompany reconciliations (ICR) is another RPA accounting use case. RPA helps you to balance accounts and produce a financial statement without any errors or mistakes. Often preparing financial sheets leads to the additional manual data entry, cross-checking, and extraction. 

Utilizing the bots helps in streamlining various tasks and automating different operations. It assists you in creating journal entries, comparing balances, file extraction or retrieval, and much more. Moreover, using the tool will assist you in searching for related documents and statements in the ERP system. 

‍6. Management of inventory 

RPA bots allow the user to monitor inventory, place and approve stock orders, update ERP and WMS, forecast the optimum inventory levels and so much more. Apart from that, the RPA tool notifies whenever the inventory runs short thus helping you to optimize what and how to offer the right products to your customers. 

‍7. Treasury management 

Extracting and formatting data for treasury management is quite complicated. Processing data manually in real-time is difficult and calls for inaccuracy. This is where the RPA bot comes in - with RPA tools, you can not only extract and format data but also can update your treasury system. Besides, it can help you manage the report sending task. 

‍8. Payroll management 

With the right platform in place, you don't have to deal with the payment delays at any time nor do you have to deal with inaccuracies in storing the data. The calculation deduction and timesheet validation are the two important aspects of payroll management. RPA helps you to generate and approve the timesheets along with data verification. Many times wrong entries and payment delays can harm your business. With such an intelligent automation tool, you can improve the payroll functions in your business. 

‍9. Tax compliance

RPA bots assist you in gathering the business data for the tax liability and automating tax compliance. Not only can you prepare the reports automatically but you can also submit them to the tax authorities with the help of software. 

‍10. Expense management

Every business owner has to plan business trips and this can be made easy and stress-free with the help of RPA. Not just for travelers, accountants can benefit from the use of RPA. With the right RPA bot, you can extract and understand different receipts types. You can aggregate data into the expense report and create paychecks. You can manage advantages and reimbursement with RPA. 

To sum up 

Since its initial introduction to the competitive financial world, robotic process automation has seen significant growth. Today, it is one of the most crucial and vital factors that help businesses to improve their in-house task.

Make sure to analyze RPA tools and their performance at times to ensure that you're getting the most out of your investment. Once you know how to use the platform and drive value, you can rest easy knowing that you can freely improve your complex and tedious chores.