The Finance and Accounting function remains one of the core departments of a business and it remains one of the most task-intensive and time-consuming verticals in any organization. The department comes with a high dependency on physical documents, volumes of unstructured and structured data, and a high investment of an employee’s time. Like any other function, this process too is being simplified through the strategic implementation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA is taking over certain time-consuming and data-intensive tasks, saving time and money, and allowing people to focus on larger tasks. However, this quest to automate comes with its own hurdles and challenges. To maximize the benefits reaped from automation, it's important to be aware of them and how to overcome them.
Reduce focus on low hanging fruit
What we mean by ’low-hanging fruit’ processes are those that are easy to identify, quick to deploy, and provide a straightforward Return on Investment (RoI).They offer the advantages of low complexity and high potential, and many firms kickstart their RPA journey by automating simpler subprocesses in finance and accounting. Automating existing Excel sheets used for tracking accounts payable exceptions is a common example, seen in the Finance function. However, over-reliance on this process-by-process approach to automation comes with its own set of challenges that include saturation in the processes to automate, employees working longer hours to automate unnecessary tasks, resulting in a loss of motivation and drive to adopt automation.
One should consider automating the complete finance department or function, for increased overall impact. This would provide firms with a holistic view and allow them to focus on exactly which time-consuming and data-intensive processes occupy their employees' time.
The importance of re-engineering processes
It is important that one has in-depth knowledge and clarity about how the end-to-end process works when automating it. Simply fixing inefficient sub-process with automation, is not the correct approach. At the same time, re-engineering a process without first considering how RPA can benefit it could be an opportunity lost to the business. It is important to re-evaluate the efficiencies of your processes during your RPA journey, in order to save time in the long run. If this is done efficiently and accurately, we will not have to revisit the automation scripts and comb for errors and shortcomings.
Involve expert business users and create citizen developers
While receiving buy-in from the IT team is important to successfully deploy any automation, it is equally important to involve subject matter experts and business process owners. In order to maximize the efficiency of the automation deployed, it is crucial to involve finance professionals in the development process. They have in-depth knowledge of every minute step and understand what is important in that particular process, better than the core team working on the project.
Involve and empower employees
Employees feel more involved while implementing automation projects if they are taken along for the ride. Hence, it is important for organizations to educate and involve employees; this can happen by primarily providing them with avenues and opportunities to upskill and reskill themselves.
We must understand that it is not necessary for automation to always be driven top-down in the organization. Automating processes like day-to-day tasks and other simple departmental activities could,and should be driven bottom-up. This invokes a sense of involvement in employees, empowering them to become citizen developers, and transforming them into automation ambassadors. As a technology, RPA is relatively simple and finance professionals will not require engineering knowledge or skills to create their own robots; especially with Low-Code or No-Code applications.
RPA, if implemented strategically and effectively, can take over tasks like data gathering, data entry, and bookkeeping, and allow finance professionals to devote time to more strategic functions. This will improve work hours, employee satisfaction, boost their confidence, and morale, effectively improving the bottom-line of the company.
Disclaimer: This blog post has been contributed by Anil Bhasin, Managing Director and Vice President, UiPath India, and South Asia.
