If you ask any finance professional who is involved in account reconciliation process, you’ll understand that this is a mundane and a tedious task, spending hours matching payments and incoming transactions against your general ledger. A huge chunk of financial organizations invest most of their time in managing accounts. Irrespective of the organization’s size and location, finance professionals will have to devote their time in checking and managing transactions manually and posting journals to complete the required bank reconciliations. Moreover, as far as mid-size and enterprise-level organizations are concerned, bank reconciliations become much more cumbersome as they deal with huge number of account types, institutions, payment types, time zones, and payment complexities.

The Manual Account Reconciliation Conundrum

The finance professionals face quite a few challenges when it comes to matching payments manually. Some of them include:

  • Duplicate entries
  • Date/time discrepancies
  • Human errors while matching data
  • Multiple transactions

Most financial organizations try to tackle these challenges through traditional methods such as manual data cleansing and forced data transformation to verify all the entries. Although some companies tried automating the process in small scale using Excel Macros, the entire process was quite cumbersome for the employees.

Automating Account Reconciliation with RPA

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the prime candidate to automate a tiring task like accounts reconciliation. With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, the automation solution can replace all the human efforts involved while matching your bank statements and general ledgers.

Scope of RPA in Accounts Reconciliation

  • Verifying the loans coming into the organization
  • Monitoring entry of duplicate payments
  • Matching receipts for debit and credit card transactions
  • Verifying payments received from customers and other sources
  • Reconciling the general ledger software
  • Checking line items of bank statements against the ledger
  • Month-end account reconciliation
  • Validation of payments in the accounts

Streamlined Workflow with RPA

Robotic Process Automation provides an end-to-end automation solution with no room for errors. The revised automated workflow goes something like this:

  • Extracting relevant documents and data
  • Cross-referencing bank balances with the ledger
  • Logging in with multiple bank accounts simultaneously
  • Preparing and dispatching bank reconciliation statements to the necessary personnel
  • Extracting relevant ledger items
  • Logging into business’ ERP and uploading the documents

Benefits of RPA in Accounts Reconciliation

Robotic Process Automation helps businesses a great deal in terms of cost savings and time. Apart from boosting ROI and customer satisfaction, automating accounts reconciliation with RPA has many benefits, irrespective of the size and location of the organization.

  1. Accurate Invoicing

Organizations must ensure customers don’t receive invoices for which they have already made payments for. Quite often, customers raise complaints for the same as companies fail to keep track of the invoices they have dispatched. Automating invoice processing with RPA ensures invoices after each sale are instantly updated and the bills sent to the customer are quite accurate.

Read the Case Study – Automating End-to-End Invoice Creation Process for a US based Automotive Company

  1. Simplified Reporting

With RPA, organizations will never miss a chance to get regular updates when the bots are scheduled to make financial payments on a pre-defined schedule. Once the accounts are reconciled against the general ledger, the bot automatically expedites the report and sends it to the relevant personnel within the organization.

  1. Faster Tax Accounting

Whenever an organization is due to pay its taxes, the reconciled reports created by the software bots are readily available for the staff in the organization to handle taxes with ease. The reports filed by the bots are 100% error-free and compliant with government tax rules and regulations.

RPA’s scope for automation in accounts reconciliation gives finance professionals the luxury of utilizing the efforts in focusing on bringing in more business for the organization by strengthening customer relationships. While the bots send you the reconciled reports, they will also notify the right personnel in case of any errors or discrepancies.

At Aspire, we provide end-to-end automation solutions for finance organizations by leveraging cognitive capabilities including machine learning and artificial intelligence. Automate your accounts reconciliation process with RPA to achieve cost savings of up to 70%.

Signup for a free consultation to know more about our RPA expertise or send in your queries at [email protected]

To know more about: RPA Finance and Accounting and its Use Cases

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