Top 10 Use Cases for Automation in Finance

Whether you work in the financial industry or in a finance and accounting department, it's your job to ensure strategic budget planning with comprehensive fiscal analysis. All while balancing the day-to-day tasks like managing payroll and billing. You need the power of robotic process automation (RPA) software.

Putting software robots to work for financial automation allows you to more efficiently manage high-volume processes across complex infrastructures. A great RPA solution will not only streamline your most tedious, repetitive, and manual processes but will also integrate with your mission-critical business applications—centralizing your automation efforts in one spot.

Here are the top ten robotic process automation examples that you can have RPA software automatically execute for you in banking, finance, and accounting:

1. Financial Review Preparation

• Connect and automate data movement from various core banking applications for easy consolidation for executive reporting.
• Cleanse data for easier formatting between applications—like Adobe or Excel—to create readable reports.

2. Account Creation

Your customers and members don’t have hours to sit while a person manually processes their applications, runs credit checks, and manually sets up access to online banking. That’s where RPA bots help to provide the ideal customer experience. You can set up RPA to process customer information, run checks, and configure the account quickly and easily.

Carter Bank & Trust, a large commercial bank, used RPA to quickly and accurately convert their bank's customer accounts into a new system with ease. "We could never have conducted data validation and correction of erroneous account information without [RPA]," said Matt Speare, CIO at Carter Bank & Trust. "I don't care if we had 100 people for a year, it never would have worked."

Read more about their RPA in banking use case and see how they saw 3,800 percent ROI with RPA.

3. Standard Journal Entries

• Create standard monthly journal entries.
• Enter and manage data into your ERP.
• Perform validation analytics to ensure accurate entries.

4. Bank Reconciliations

• Automate bank statement download workflows for individual accounts.
• Create text files and store them in appropriate folders.
• Reconcile balance and transactions to core finance sub-systems.
• Create balancing journal entries to handle discrepancies.

5. Intercompany Reconciliation

• Check and reconcile balances on intercompany accounts.
• Conduct basic research and reporting for any exceptions between accounts.
• Create exception files and automated email reports for review and approvals.

6. Accounts Payable Processing

• Use AP automation to optimize resources, reduce spend, and focus on more strategic work.
• Setup and maintain processes for paying different vendors.
• Create workflows for accounts payable approvals.
• Enter data to complete payment preparation and processing.
• Process payments and bulk payment files for sub-system journal entries.

7. Account Reconciliation

Not only is this a time-consuming process when done manually, but it also leaves room for error with data re-keying across systems. RPA helps by matching up data with records in disparate systems. Bots can detect duplicate entries, synthesize data stored in different formats across systems, and reconcile accounts accurately.

• Download subaccount balances into pre-approved formats.
• Upload transaction data from various sub-systems and different formats.
• Perform data validation and exception research and handling.
• Create and balance journal entries, noting and remediating discrepancies.

8. Financial Planning and Analysis

• Connect pre-population of forecasts using historical and market data.
• Load balances into planning systems to record.
• Create variance reports that show pre-population and actuals.

9. Operational Finance and Accounting

• Conduct pricing review approval process to handle multiple variations for customer accounts.
• Calculate and process rebates.
• Download detailed monthly sales data and commission calculations.
• Create and distribute automated reports to key stakeholders.
• Create files and emails to gain approvals.
• Post necessary information to general ledgers and sub-systems.

10. Regulatory Compliance and Reporting

Have audit reports at the ready by employing RPA to pull reports on a regular basis.

• Pre-populate annual complex reporting and routing.
• Capture and manipulate data to support auto-generated regulatory reports.
• Create an audit trail or reports and get confirmation of receipt.
  • BSA/AML audits
  • KYC (Know Your Customer) to collect, screen, and validate customer data
  • CRA (Community Reinvestment Act)