Elevate Business Processes with Robotics Process Automation

Robotics process automation (RPA) continues to play an important role in the digital transformation taking place throughout the business world, and many companies that have embraced this new emerging technology have certainly benefited from it.  Organizations have been able to implement RPA to enhance their business processes and share data at a much more rapid pace.

EisnerAmper spoke at the Digital CPA Conference in Seattle on how RPA can help enhance capabilities for emerging technologies. During the session titled “Elevate Business Processes with Robotics Process Automation (RPA),” we shared our insights on the topic.

Risk Management   

Through RPA, companies have been able to more effectively manage risk and implement stronger controls, including input processing, output preparation, and internal control execution to ultimately implement intelligent automation, which combines elements of both RPA and artificial intelligence (AI).  

“These are areas where people start,” EisnerAmper said. “Companies can use them for continuous monitoring of controls by putting automation in place where a bot can review access controls and have rights to business applications, which is referred to as identity access management. RPA is often used to access these programs. This is one way of managing risk and implementing controls.”

“Also, if you have multiple systems and have data in multiple systems and create a dashboard, RPA can be used to aggregate and consolidate data that can be used to review risk across a business area.”

Business Processes

Emerging technologies can use RPA to automate business processes including processes related to finance and accounting, billing and receivables, purchasing and payables, and production and inventory.  For example, invoice processing is one business process area where RPA can be used to capture and extract data from an invoice and then add the data to other systems. Further, it can be employed to perform reconciliation, generate letters of credit, provide notices to different vendors and also post transactions to the sub ledgers.

RPA is also used by companies to streamline their financial close by using RPA bots to perform reconciliations, and manage and resolve exceptions.  Finally, RPA can be used to post journal entries to general ledger, complete intercompany transactions and execute consolidations/ reporting functions.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, companies can use RPA to enhance their processes across industries and functions, ultimately empowering them to achieve new opportunities to utilize automation tools and provide better outcomes including a very favorable customer experience.

“One of the nice things about RPA is that you can apply it across the enterprise and it just doesn’t just sit in one business area. It allows organizations to share data they wouldn’t normally share,” EisnerAmper said. “It can be done in a fraction of the time it would take if we relied on manual processes. RPA can help clients resolve problems and answer questions. And finally, chat bots can enhance the overall customer experience by resolving questions and issues for clients in real time.”

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