No one wants to spend their day copying and pasting numbers into Excel or reformatting budget reports. Report generation is the data management process that companies most wish they could automate. And with good reason—the right robotic process automation (RPA) software can take report generation and distribution off your hands and save hours every day. Plus, RPA doesn’t just save time, it also saves you from errors for more accurate reporting.
How Does Automated Report Generation Work?
With an RPA solution, automated report generation works via software bots that interact with your systems and platforms the way any human would. An RPA bot extracts data from practically any source and can manipulate and transform it into the necessary format for your report. Then, the bots can distribute it to key stakeholders—all automatically and without writing any code.
In this demo video, you’ll see how an RPA workflow interacts with accounting systems, like Sage 50, to automatically generate general ledger and budget reports and save them to a shared drive or email them to key stakeholders.
Automated Report Generation Use Cases
If you’re in the accounting department, the end of the month can mean long hours and late nights compiling your month-end reports. Things get even more complicated when your company is spread through diverse geographies and your accountant in North America has to wait until midnight to log in and run reports quickly before Europe gets on the system and makes changes.
Does this scenario sound familiar? With RPA, eliminate the need for manually generating reports and let your accounting team get the sleep they deserve. There are countless ways to put RPA to automate reporting, but check out these use cases from three companies that saw big results.
Lottery Corporation Distributes Over 300 Reports Securely
The Louisiana Lottery Corporation had intense reporting and distribution requirements. Employees in departments such as security, accounting, and price payment needed access to accurate, on-demand information to monitor the progress of lottery ticket sales during the business day. Additionally, employees required over 300 summary reports each day. There was no way this could be accomplished manually.
By implementing RPA, the company not only automated reporting, but incorporated report generation into an overall automation strategy that included secure file transfers and end-of-day reconciliation of transactions—all with a single software solution.
“In the past we used Windows Task Scheduler to initiate scripts, but this caused our system to hang on a routine basis. We simply don’t have that problem anymore with Automate.” – Richard Harris, IT Director, Louisiana Lottery
Home Products Company Saves 20 Hours Per Week Automating SAP Crystal Reports
Not only did wholesale appliance distributor Echelon Home Products spend 20 hours each week generating and distributing Crystal Reports, but the process was also causing an all-day network slowdown every Monday. They eventually turned to an RPA tool to process 110 weekly and 71 monthly reports unattended.
“That budgeting job used to monopolize four or five people for two or three days straight. I automated it and created the files we needed in less than 90 minutes.” – David Brown, Systems Analyst, Echelon Home Products
Laboratory Saves 3 to 4 Hours Per Day with Automated Report Generation
Pacific Toxicology provides drug testing, biological monitoring, medical surveillance, therapeutic drug monitoring, and forensic toxicology. This requires the use of a variety of disparate systems to gather testing data, upload it, interact with customers and partners, and generate and distribute reports. Before implementing RPA, PacTox didn’t have a consolidated solution to manage these processes. But with automated report generation, they’ve not only saved time, but improved customer service and satisfaction.
“With Automate, our team is able to focus on other projects. It’s like we all have an assistant who saves us 3 to 4 hours of work each day.” – Bernadette Apostol-Rebite, IT Manager, Pacific Toxicology
Try Automated Report Generation Today
Does your department have reporting tasks that take up hours every week or every day? Start a trial of robotic process automation from Automate to see how easy it is to automate report generation—all without writing any code.