10 RPA Hacks That Will Revolutionize Finance Once and for All

Invaluable hacks to make RPA even more efficient

1. Comparing prices

Monitoring and comparing the prices of competitors is a vital task for many organizations, but it’s also time-consuming. Streamline this process by employing RPA technology to check catalog pricing and free up your employees’ time. Be sure to program your bot to fully represent the needs of your company so you get the best possible results from using RPA.

2. Use RPA to mine external sources for data on customers

Lending companies and banking institutions are required to carry out customer due diligence and know-your-customer checks on data and verify it. RPA can validate credit and transaction histories, credit scores, data records and all sorts of other information, meaning your staff don’t have to. It can also collect data from external sources like commerce business registers and news portals.

3. Launch a bot to onboard new suppliers

While invoice portals have become fairly ubiquitous, most organizations don’t have such a streamlined process for onboarding suppliers in the first place. Creating a bot that can automatically produce reports on a prospective supplier’s credit score, tax data and related information will transform yet another manual process.

4. Reconcile delivery notes with purchase orders

Keeping a track of shipments against orders can be time-consuming, so using a robot to match them up is an obvious solution. It means a human staff member only needs to get involved when there’s an exception and will be notified by the bot when that’s the case.

5. Manage data

Gathering together financial and operational data and then analyzing it promptly can feel like a constant battle. RPA can automate this process and present the findings to executives so they can make business-critical decisions in an informed manner.

6. Use RPA to set up home workstations

With more staff working from home than ever before, there’s no reason that RPA should be restricted to the office environment. Facilitate remote working and the setting up of home offices by automating processes like trouble-free registration of new hardware, establishing VPN access and linking a specific employee ID to new equipment’s registration numbers.

7. Log attendance and hours

Keeping track of employee schedules and compliance with a large team spread across multiple locations has its challenges. A bot that automatically logs hours and sends reminders to staff of their obligations can keep track of everybody’s whereabouts. This data should be integrated into payroll and HR systems for a seamless process that requires minimal human intervention.

8. Create an implementation strategy

While RPA has a lot of potential to revolutionize your business, it’s important not to try to run before you can walk. Working with the IT department, finance professionals should put together a strategy for implementing the technology. This should start small and stretch out into various areas of operation as staff become accustomed to the automation being put in place.

9. Complement RPA with the right skills

Don’t eschew human input into your RPA strategy, as it’s important to have people with the right skills overseeing your automation efforts. This could be at the implementation stage or further down the line and could involve obtaining specialist skills from external sources.

10. Review your RPA requirements

Like many modern ways of doing business, RPA should be seen as an ongoing process and not a task with a start and end date. Over time, it makes sense to continue reviewing your company’s needs and switch up any automated systems that could become more efficient with new tools and updated methods.