It’s just another business day in your accounting office. You grab coffee, chit-chat in the kitchen, and get to business. The rest of the day flies by on repetitive tasks. Payments, invoices, bank statements, reports, and spreadsheets. A lot of spreadsheets.
You trudge through that red tape, but what can you do? Statement by statement, digit by digit, you go through each file twice to make sure no error has crept into your books. Unless… Unless you use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to make your accounting life easier, more pleasant, and more satisfying.
As we will prove in this article, accounting, and finance processes are the perfect candidates for RPA optimization. So, if no other phrase makes you as excited as “automated accounting processes,” read on; otherwise, read anyway and learn why it should.
The key challenges of accounting (RPA can solve)
Many accounting tasks are considered tedious and straightforward. However, this simplicity can be misleading. Successfully managing all financial operations requires coordinating multiple jobs, including those listed below. Traditionally, they are performed manually or in a semi-automated fashion. RPA solutions remove many risks involved in their execution and improve their performance accuracy, efficiency, and speed.

- Keeping up with regulatory changes — Ensuring compliance can be taxing between updates and revisions.
- Developing forecast analyses — Predicting financial outcomes is essential in accounting, but it can involve massive data volumes that are difficult to process efficiently.
- Manual data entry — Typing financial data manually seems unavoidable but increases the risk of errors and requires time.
- Paying suppliers — Handling payments individually may be accurate, but it also slows you down, especially when suppliers need to be chased after.
- Reporting — Compiling high-quality, insightful reports is another tedious-but-necessary job that is becoming increasingly difficult as requirements for speed, transparency, and insightful data grow.
- Document retrieval — Tracking and requesting missing documents is a bottleneck that often hampers the progress of other processes.
- Order and invoice processing — This is the bread and butter of accounting that sometimes may taste sour, especially when using an excess of accounting systems in standalone silos or trying to identify the missing details.
- Risk assessment — No matter how strong your audit system is, some inconsistencies will always slip through the cracks, such as the lack of contextual understanding of the organization or function or missing ground rules for conducting the assessment.
- Reconciling bank statements — Every accountant’s favorite jigsaw puzzle; is a regular chore that can take ages (and a lot of focus) if done manually and is extremely error-prone.
What (and why) to automate?
When asked about the main benefits of manual process automation in the accounting industry, most of 2021’s Corporate Financial Reporting Insights conference participants answered: increased efficiency. And it’s easy to see why: when it comes to easy, repetitive tasks, a well-programmed algorithm will be capable of processing data faster and more accurately than a human accountant.
Efficiency boost
Here are some of the easily-automated accounting processes:
- Extracting accounts payable and receivable data from sources in various formats, such as Excel, using optical character recognition (OCR).
- By automatically assigning purchase orders to their respective invoices, the algorithm helps accountants save countless hours they would otherwise spend tracing charges.
- As a sequence of repetitive tasks such as data input, calculating individual paychecks, or disbursement, payroll management is another easy pick for automation.
Error reduction
Accounting mostly deals with numbers, which has pros and cons: on the one hand, it’s logical, but on the other, any mistake will affect all other tasks down the pipeline. For this reason, error prevention was another advantage of automated accounting processes listed in the survey.
- Manual data entry and sharing? Forget it—automated scripts will ensure that your financial records end up in the right place, error-free. In the meantime, you can focus on more sophisticated tasks.
- Whether you need to validate checks or compare invoice data with account balance, automation turns reconciliation a breeze.
- If you can’t help sweating about the looming tax season year by year, automation may take your worries away by taking care of tax updates, financial statements, or preparing tax returns.