In this blog, we will explore the different areas in Finance and Accounting that can automated and save us time and money. It goes without saying empowering the productivity boom that is a must in this globally connected environment and also fighting to stay relevant and active in this pandemic.

Accounts Payable

Enterprises receive millions of Accounts Payable invoices each year. Manual processing of these is not just time consuming. The unrelenting workload makes the data entry and error reconciliation inaccurate, which makes it vulnerable to audits.

RPA for Oracle Financials provide solutions that

  1. Capture invoice from multiple channels
  2. Make a digital copy
  3. Extracts information from images
  4. And Populates invoice fields
  5. Automates invoice matches with purchase order
  6. Integrates the result into enterprise applications

As part of an enterprise platform, RPA for Oracle’s Accounts Payable integrated financials, workflow and content management capabilities into configurable solutions that are tailored for customer needs. These integrated middleware solutions work together to optimize AP efficiency, enforce data integrity and increase security of sensitive finance data.

This provides CFOs visibility into AP processes that help streamline accruals, simplify error reconciliation and improve cash management. It gives visibility to detailed audit trails, optimizes key processes and tracks workflow.

Account Reconciliation

It is a common sight to see accountants spend days at a stretch to match transactions and tally accounts. Many of reconciliation mismatches follow standard patterns—double entry, a positive sign instead of a negative, debit instead of credit, etc. Account Reconciliation takes considerable time since it involves

  • Vendor payments comprising different time and payment methods
  • Multiple payment methods
  • Numerous business entities and locations

However, RPA leads to a seamless reconciliation process, substantially reducing the need for manual intervention. With intelligent and configurable rules to recognize these patterns, RPA automates these reconciliations; deduces the issue and solves it. RPA leads to 80% reduced efforts for accounting staff. This is because RPA enables:

  • Automatic login to Oracle ERP
  • Automatic login to multiple bank accounts
  • Data extraction from general ledger by Bots
  • Preparation of bank reconciliation statement with a predefined template
  • Cross referencing balances from bank statements to general ledgers

Game Changer – Finance Closure

At most corporates, finance closure at the end of a year or quarter resembles a fire drill. The management of several dependencies like finance team, accounts and subsidiary companies makes the tracking a complex and error prone process. If you can’t tally an account, it creates a ripple effect into all others.

RPA is a savior and automates much of this orchestration in the following ways:

  • Automatically tracks status of task completion across multiple systems
  • Automatically kicks off closure processes after completion of dependent tasks
  • Updates closure calendar to keep you apprised on where you stand in the financial closure process

Procure-to-Pay

Demands of business agility in today’s competitive markets cannot be merely matched with Oracle ERP expertise and its automation alone. A Hackett Group report says that ERP solutions do not have the edge to match complex activities like matching electronic or printed invoices with supplier master data, shipping orders, purchase order, tax or discount data. This is where Robotic Process Automation has a strong use case.

RPA simplifies processes with the following steps:

  • Invoice scanned into a digital version and stored as pdf
  • The bots scan, extract and store the data and index it for easy future retrieval
  • The Bots login to Oracle ERP, enter data and match the data with PO
  • After checkout, the bots issue payments that are self-driven

Get Started

You can start with small steps rather than doing it in a big way. Deploy RPA in one area/process and get it work to your expectation and satisfaction. Once you have achieved this, you will be confident in rolling it out in other areas and processes. Avoid thinking in isolation and assume it as part of Intelligent Process Transformation in Finance. Preferably, this should be a step towards your transition to the cloud. Furthermore, by adopting IPA you have gained efficiency and ability to gather business insights for speedy decision making.

Learn more about Intelligent Process Automation in Oracle Finance in this whitepaper.

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