What is Automatable in Finance & Accounting?
Automatable Transactional Activities in Finance
Accounting
- Automating complex journal entries
- Performing and documenting account reconciliations
- Calculating and applying allocations
- Maintaining fixed-asset accounts
Account Payables
- Entering nonelectronic-data-interchange invoice
- Performing 2- and/or 3-way invoice matches
- Processing expense-approval requests
- Completing audits (eg, duplicate supplier payments)
Revenue Management
- Generating and validating invoices
- Applying cash to outstanding balances
- Analyzing and processing disputes
- Creating reports (eg, accounts receivable aging, credit holds)
Planning & Analysis
- Building standard management reports
- Consolidating and validating budget and forecast inputs
- Gathering and cleaning data for analysis
Payroll
- Flagging time-sheet errors and omissions
- Auditing reported hours against schedule
- Calculating deductions
- Harmonizing data across multiple timekeeping systems
Other
- Preparing external-reporting templates
- Conducting transaction audits of high-risk areas
- Preparing wire-transfer requests
Automation takes the robot out of the human
ROI varies between 30 and as much as 200 percent in the first year
$5 – $7 trillion estimated impact from automation by 2025
The future of work looks set to be not a tale of machines replacing humans, but of machines complementing humans in the workplace
By 2025, automation will be able to perform tasks equal to the output of 140 million FTEs
47% of US employment to be automated by 2030
Metrics to measure the full ROI of an RPA deployment
VELOCITY
Measure the start time versus stop time of a back-office process before and after an RPA deployment and compare
Productivity
Measure human hours spent on a task before and after automation
Quality
Measure output accuracy before and after RPA deployment — it should be 100 percent after
Compliance
Measure compliance before and after RPA deployment — it should be 100 percent after
Case Study: Revenue Management
120% ROI in Revenue Management
Velocity
60% ↑
Productivity
80% ↑
Quality
100%
Cost
50%↓
Time
5 weeks
Compliance
100%
Automation Delivery Methodology
Step 1: Assess Digital Opportunity for Client’s Processes
Top-down sizing of digital opportunity and break-down of automation levels at a sub-process level
Step 2: Select and Prioritize Process
Application of a proven methodology to select and prioritize right processes based on potential and complexity
Step 3: Re-design and Optimize Process
Optimize process by eliminating redundancy, duplication of work and identifying opportunities for resource re-use. Continuous improvement is at the core of the analysis for automation, improvement of the process is the main goal and not the degree of automation.
Step 4: Document Process
The description of processes to its most detailed steps and understanding potential exceptions (technical and business) in order to build robust automation workflows that can be passed on to the development team
Step 5: Automate Process
Based on step 4, automation workflows are programmed and process is automated
Step 6: Test Automated Process
The automated process is tested to observe its behavior to fix potential bugs and catch exceptions that might have been missed in step 4 and 5
Step 7: Deploy and Monitor Automated Process
For a period of 2-3 weeks, the process is monitored by the technical and business teams to correct any remaining issues until a high level of reliability is reached