How RPA is Revolutionizing the Finance World (And Why Every CFO Should Adopt It)

1. Accounts payable

Making sure your vendor invoices and bills are paid not just on time, but with complete accuracy, is essential if you want to build relationships with suppliers and avoid late payment penalties. In the long term, this will help you negotiate favorable terms on supply contracts and access credit more easily.

RPA can make your accounts payable operations quicker and more accurate by removing the need for human employees to complete laborious jobs such as checking and recording account information on invoices, processing payments and keeping records of transactions.

You can also assign bots to send prompts to relevant parties at different stages of the payment cycle, which reduces the risk of delays or lapses in communication disrupting the process.

2. Accounts receivable and invoicing

As important as it is to pay your vendors and creditors on time, you should also be focused on ensuring your business is receiving what it's owed and unscrupulous customers aren't taking advantage of inefficiencies in your invoicing.

Relying solely on employees to do jobs such as correctly issuing and tracking invoices, reconciling invoices against sales and sending customer reminders can result in mistakes being made. This adds unnecessary complexity to the payment cycle and can have severe repercussions for your cash flow.

3. Budgeting

Effective budgeting is vital to the performance and success of any business. With accurate budgets that give a clear picture of the company's financial position, you can feel more confident about:

• Attracting outside investment
• Setting relevant and achievable sales targets
• Meeting broader financial objectives for the business as a whole
• Making the right spending and investment decisions
• Being prepared for emergencies and unforeseen challenges

RPA enables you to budget with greater speed and efficiency by automatically collecting existing data from your systems and using accurate, up-to-date information as a starting point for your next budget.

4. Regulatory compliance

Compliance with ever-changing financial regulations can be a huge challenge, but it's something you need to get right if you want to avoid serious financial and reputational risks.

If you're looking for a new way to approach compliance and governance of your financial processes, RPA can help by offering support with activities such as collecting data from various systems and documents to be used in reporting.

You can also go a step further into the AI realm and test out technologies driven by machine learning and predictive analytics, which could help you identify and secure data that might be required for auditing in the future.

5. Payroll

A smooth and well-functioning payroll process is fundamental to the performance of your workforce - and consequently the company as a whole - as people who aren't being paid properly will soon start to feel disengaged and undervalued.

Payroll management can be notoriously complicated, especially for larger businesses with various salaries, holiday entitlements, fringe benefits and other factors to take into account. Using a dedicated software solution that leverages the power of RPA can take much of the complexity out of this task and reduce the risk of potentially disastrous mistakes being made.

Benefits across the business

In addition to the specific cost, process and efficiency advantages offered by RPA in the finance department, there are other, more holistic benefits that can be achieved across the company as a whole.

Employees who no longer have to worry about tedious manual tasks such as entering data into invoices or chasing up late payments can focus on more strategic and fulfilling activities that make better use of their skills.

Rather than examining figures in spreadsheets to check they're correct, for example, finance professionals can take a broader view of what those numbers mean for the business and how this relates to your future plans and objectives.

Another key benefit of RPA is transparency. When the business uses a single software platform to manage and store data relating to crucial functions such as payroll and budgeting, executives know exactly where to look when they're examining these areas.

This could prove particularly important when there are big decisions being made that could dictate the future of the business.