Top Six Processes You Should Automate

1. Bank Transaction Recording

Entering the financial transactions from your bank account to your accounting software is a mundane task, but it is probably taking more time than you realize. If you process credit card transaction have multiple bank accounts or just generally see a significant volume of bank activity, RPA can help speed up the recording of the transactions. When performing the recording daily, even a minor savings of 15 minutes will add up to a major savings over time.

2.  Report Generation

Creating reports for management is often a significant piece of an employee’s job responsibilities. In some instances, you may have invested in a reporting tool that can do most of the work for you. However, it is more likely that the reporting function requires hours of manual data extraction, sorting, organizing, generating secondary calculations and assembling of the final report. Waiting for the server to compile the data may be a significant time investment unto itself. By employing automation, you can have the report generated overnight and waiting in your inbox in the morning. After a manual review, you can tell the bot to distribute the report to all of the interested parties.

3. Compliance Monitoring

Maintaining compliance with a customer or regulatory requirements is an important part of many businesses. Without an active effort to monitor compliance, your business could risk fines, non-payment or other legal action that would negatively affect your business. Having an employee dedicated to compliance monitoring can be unreasonable or impractical. Automating compliance checks can help ensure your business is staying compliant and warn you when issues arise.

4. Data Extraction and Integration

The information your business needs to operate does not always come in a form that can easily be analyzed or ingested into your applications. Without direct data integration, re-keying data into your systems or other methods of transferring the data can be required. RPA is a quick way to take structured or semi-structured data from a wide variety of sources and integrate the data into your business applications. This type of automation is common with CRM systems as well as in B2B data collection processes.

5. Cash Receipts

Matching a payment to the invoice usually involves a number of different systems. Most businesses allow for a variety of payment options. You may get direct ACH payments to your bank account, but a third-party processor could be used to collect credit card payments.  In addition, there are the checks you received in the mail. Now that you have the cash, someone needs to match the payments to outstanding invoices and record them to your accounting ledger. Automating these processes can offload the majority of this task work and provide faster processing of receivables and increased accuracy.

6. Billing

Generating bills is not always a straightforward process. This can especially be true in service-based businesses. Calculating what needs to be invoiced to your customer can take a long time and involve a number of complex calculations. RPA can help streamline the generation of invoices and shorten the time it takes to be paid for the products and services you have delivered.

If you would like more information on automating processes for your business, contact a member of Schneider Downs Technology Advisors or visit our website.