Accounts processes have been traditionally performed by employees working to complete repetitive, time-consuming tasks. But now most of these tasks can be automated, freeing up staff to focus on broader strategic financial analysis.

Software robots now perform different tasks in firms that have adopted them, from account reconciliation to intercompany transactions, auditing expenses and managing vendor invoices and payments, recording journal entries, fixed-asset accounting and to maintain account data and perform strategic data analysis.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is particularly useful and easily adopted in accounts payable across a company’s procure-to-pay cycle, where processes such as vendor master data management and invoice processing allow for a greater degree of automation. 

 Robotic software has been especially beneficial for A/P processes where invoice processing is required. This is due mostly to recent advances in RPA technologies that can read and interpret unstandardised invoices and make sense of unstructured data – something previous software has been unable to achieve. 

 Invoice processing commonly requires the data entry of indexed invoice data into ERP or legacy systems so that there is matching of the Goods Received Note (GRN), invoice and Purchase Order (PO). But these laborious tasks can now be easily automated with RPA. 

 Firms can implement robots to manage incoming vendor invoices, to produce expense reports and even to process vendor payments and handle disputes or claims. 

Read the full story at https://www.canon.com.au/fastbusiness/automate-finance-for-efficiency-gains-in-2017