Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has created a stir among multiple industries – finance is one of those. As one of the emerging technologies, it witnessed fast adoption in the finance industry. The manufacturing industry has already been using RPA for a long time and has witnessed its plethora of benefits in improving operational efficiency and productivity.
The financial sector can leverage the potential benefits of RPA in several ways and benefit from it. From improving the speed of accounts receivable/payable to auditing financial statements automatically, RPA can transform finance-related business in various ways.
We all know that human beings have certain limitations when it comes to manual data processing. It also leaves a vast scope of errors, apart from making the entire process time-consuming and expensive.
This is the reason why Power Automate RPA for finance management emerged as the most effective solution for this type of problem. The technology includes the capability of handling data efficiently compared to humans. The entire process is not only less time-consuming but also cost-efficient.
What is Microsoft Power Automate RPA?
As a cloud-based automation platform, Microsoft Power Automate enables businesses to automate those repetitive tasks that are highly time-consuming. Power Automate RPA mainly leverages software robots, which are also popular as ‘bots’ to do several tasks, including data extraction, data entry, report generation, and many more.
These bots are capable of mimicking various human actions that are repetitive and rule-based. It reflects that bots can work 24/7, even without the need for breaks and minimizes the overall time in completing any tasks.
Ways RPA can Transform Finance Management
We will discuss here several ways that RPA automates the financial sector to help you understand the way it transforms finance management.
1. Invoice Process
When it comes to invoicing, it’s one of the most time-consuming tasks in finance management. Account payable teams are responsible for entering data manually from invoices into their account software. It not only takes a lot of time but also makes errors inevitable. Meanwhile, you can automate this entire process through RPA.
Power Automate RPA by extracting data from invoices. It makes invoice processing less time-consuming but also minimizes errors. It thus reduces burdens on your account payable teams and helps them focus on the more crucial tasks.
2. Improve Financial Reporting
Financial reporting is another crucial task that many financial institutions need to perform. The task involves the preparation of financial reports and their analysis. By leveraging Power Automate RPA, you can automate the entire process of financial report generation by gathering data from multiple sources and compiling the same into reports automatically. It minimizes the overall time for generating reports, errors, etc. It ensures the accuracy of reports as well.
3. Automate Cash Management
Cash management is one of the primary aspects of the financial institution. It involves analyzing the cash flow and also ensures the availability of enough cash to match the financial requirements.
With the Power Automate RPA, you can easily automate the tasks related to cash management including monitoring cash balances, reconciling bank accounts, generating cash flow reports, and more. It ensures the accuracy of cash management. It also helps your financial team to make a fully informed decision based on the updated information.
4. Improve Account Receivable
RPA adds value to your accounts receivable team as well. It automates the entire process of invoice generation and sending it to many customers. RPA bots to automate the process of sending invoices based on certain predefined criteria, including payment terms, and send them to customers through emails and different communication channels.
It reduces the overall time that the process takes for invoice generation and also for removing errors. Through automation, you also get a kind of guarantee that your customers get invoices timely.
5. Enhance Security and Compliance
Security and compliance are one of the main concerns of finance management. It ensures financial data is fully secured and can meet different regulatory requirements. Power Automate RPA also works effectively in improving security and compliance through automation tasks, including access control, data backup, audit trail management, and many more.
It also gives you a kind of assurance that your financial data is fully secure and compliant, minimizing the risk of data breaches and also numerous other security incidents.
6. Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding is one of the stringent and time-consuming tasks as it needs several documents for verification manually. So, you can automate the entire process through numerous tools for data extraction from KYC with the use of OCR that can be matched with the data offered by customers.
In case of no discrepancies, it includes the capability of entering the data automatically into the customer management portal. It thus removes the possibility of human error and also saves both the time and effort that your employees put in.
7. Automate Report Generation
Many financial institutions including banks need to generate compliance reports regularly. These reports are related to numerous fraudulent activities. Compliance offers read and checks and fill up the required details in the SAR.
They do this task manually, which makes it cumbersome and time-consuming. But, when you implement this with the natural language generation ability, the entire process can be completed quickly even in less time.
8. Account Opening
The account opening process involves the verification of documents. If done manually, it becomes more clumsy and time-consuming. With the implementation of RPA, you can make this task less time-consuming and more straightforward with improved accuracy. Automation easily removes errors, which generally exist between new account opening requests and the core banking system. It thus improves the data quality as well.
9. Account Closure
It’s another task that banks need to deal with to a wider extent. Financial institutions need to deal with a large number of requests for account closure on a monthly basis. They need to deal with this mainly because of non-compliance with consumers’ parts.
It helps them solve the issues easily by keeping an eye on several customers and also sending them automatically generated notifications and also several reminders for submission of needed documents.
Final Words
Microsoft Power Automate RPA for finance management has the vast potential to take the financial industry to the next level. It automates many crucial tasks and makes them less time-consuming even without leaving any scope for error. So, if you are still planning to leverage RPA, it’s the right time to implement this in your business and discover numerous growth opportunities.
Related Reading:
Choosing Microsoft Power Automate for RPA | Is It the Right Choice?
Attended RPA Vs Unattended RPA | What Are the Differences?
Power Automate Vs Automation Anywhere Vs UiPath | What to Choose?
