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How does robotic process automation (RPA) transform accounting operations?

Tue, 09 May 2023 21:17:38 -0500

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is transforming various industries by automating repetitive and rule-based tasks. Accounting is no exception to this trend, and RPA is changing the way businesses approach accounting automation. According to CPA Journal research, they believe that RPA is a great addition to the accounting industry. They also point out that accounts have been very adaptive towards this new-age tech.

RPA is the use of software robots or bots to mimic humans' actions to execute repetitive and rule-based tasks. In accounting, RPA is revolutionizing how organizations manage their finances, enabling them to automate time-consuming and error-prone manual processes.

Are you worried that you have not realized the full potential of this tech in your accounting work? In this article, we will explore how RPA is transforming accounting automation and the benefits it offers to businesses.

Top applications of RPA in accounting and finance management

Accounts payable and accounts receivable automation
Payroll automation and management

Tax handling
Automating account reconciliations and audits
Preparation of the company’s financial reports
Budgeting and forecasting
Keeping up with contract compliances

Automated payments and invoice management

Multiple ways in which RPA is transforming accounting operations

If you are struggling with your bulky accounting work, you are not the only one. But the good news is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems are here to simplify the tasks for you. You no longer need to waste hours and days handling your accounts manually when the right technology selection can automate them for you.

Check out how this tech is already helping the accounting industry in reimagining business proceedings.

Automated Data Entry

Data entry is a significant part of the accounting process, and it can be time-consuming and error-prone. RPA can automate data entry by extracting data from various sources, such as invoices, receipts, and bank statements.

RPA bots can extract the data and enter it into the appropriate accounting software, reducing the time and effort required for manual data entry. Automated data entry also reduces the risk of errors that can occur during manual data entry.

This should be your top priority because Stanford research says 88% of data breach issues are due to manual data entry errors. So, why leave your finances to chance and lose data and money over minor errors when RPA can have you covered?

Improved Accuracy and Efficiency

RPA bots are highly accurate and can execute tasks faster than humans. By automating repetitive and rule-based tasks, RPA reduces the risk of errors and frees up human resources to focus on more complex tasks. RPA also improves efficiency by completing tasks faster than humans, enabling organizations to complete their accounting processes in less time.

Cost Savings

Automating accounting processes with RPA can result in significant cost savings for organizations. RPA bots can work 24/7, eliminating the need for overtime pay or additional staffing during peak periods.

RPA also reduces the risk of errors, which can lead to costly mistakes that can impact the bottom line. By automating accounting processes with RPA, organizations can save money while improving accuracy and efficiency.

Accounting Audits

RPA can be designed to determine whether the cost and amount differ between sales orders, order information, bills, and shipping information. It can also be configured to warn users when there are cost and quantity discrepancies in a transaction.

Automating these processes allows auditors to redistribute their time to higher-value tasks, improving the audit's overall quality. RPA software enables auditors to gain a deeper comprehension of the client's business operations.

Research says that RPA has helped businesses get a better standard of audits and improves the standard of work for public accounting firms in general.

Faster Month-End Close

The month-end close process can be time-consuming and complex, requiring accountants to reconcile accounts, perform journal entries, and create financial statements. RPA can streamline the month-end close process by automating tasks such as data entry, account reconciliation, and journal entries. By automating these tasks, organizations can complete the month-end close process faster and with greater accuracy.

When you have properly logged in books at the end of each month, it also helps you file your taxes on time at the year's end. You no longer have to filter through bulky data to get vital information when all of the important financial details are sorted out in your books.

Fraud Prevention

Accounting fraud is a significant concern for organizations, and RPA can help prevent fraud by automating internal controls. RPA can monitor transactions and identify anomalies or unusual patterns, alerting the organization to potential fraudulent activity.

RPA can also flag transactions that do not meet predetermined criteria, reducing the risk of fraud and improving overall financial integrity.

Scalability

RPA is highly scalable, enabling organizations to automate accounting processes as their business grows. RPA bots can easily be scaled up or down depending on the organization's needs, providing flexibility and agility to adapt to changing business requirements. RPA also enables organizations to easily integrate with other systems, such as ERP systems, further streamlining accounting processes.

Improved Customer Service

RPA can also improve customer service by automating tasks such as invoice processing and payment reconciliation. By automating these tasks, organizations can process invoices and payments faster, improving cash flow and reducing the time it takes to resolve customer queries. RPA can also automate the creation of customer invoices, ensuring accuracy and consistency.

Integrate RPA and other new-age tech solutions with Assetsoft

In conclusion, RPA is transforming accounting automation by automating repetitive and rule-based tasks, improving accuracy and efficiency. It also reduces costs, streamlines the month-end close process, prevents fraud, provides scalability, and improves customer service.

Organizations that implement RPA in their accounting processes can achieve significant benefits, improving their financial integrity and enabling them to focus on more complex tasks. As RPA continues to evolve and improve, we can expect to see further advancements in accounting automation that will transform the way organizations manage their finances.

Deloitte research says RPA bots are here to shake up the accounting industry, and they are here to stay. More than 53% of businesses are already using RPA in accounting, and the numbers are increasing each day.

So, what are you waiting for? Give us a call, and let us get started with your customized RPA integration plans.

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The Top RPA Trends in Real Estate

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 11:48:57 -0500

Robotic process automation is more than a trend these days. We’ve seen it go from an interesting concept to one of the most significant innovations for real estate companies. After helping dozens of companies integrate RPA, we can safely say it’s a game changer.

However, it’s still a very young technology, especially compared to other concepts like ERP systems, CRM, and document management systems. That’s why we still find ourselves explaining RPA to clients, even after they’ve requested the technology themselves.

RPA has a vast range of benefits, especially once specific platforms and tasks come into play. We’ve found RPA scripts from UiPath and similar solutions to be a lot more versatile than what appears at first glance.

That’s why we’re exploring RPA and its effects on the real estate industry today.

How can property management benefit from RPA?

Real estate keeps growing as an industry. There will always be a need for home and shelter, so real estate and property management companies are just part of our nature. That’s enough reason for technological innovations, like RPA, to be useful.

That said, we also need to consider the current global context we’re living in. Countless businesses have taken a significant hit, and real estate has been quite uncertain for a while now. We need efficiency and cost-effective solutions more than ever.

That means RPA is starting to become a necessity more than just an edge, like it used to be. RPA allows you to relocate resources to projects with better returns without neglecting basic and repetitive tasks within your company.

ComTec Information Systems has a nice and short article on the primary advantages of RPA for property management. It offers great insight into the fundamental functionality of RPA, while shedding light into what else is possible.

Refunds

Reimbursements are quite common for many companies, and overpayment isn’t as rare as you’d think. RPA allows you to notify account receivable teams immediately, as well as help them validate, calculate, and send the required payment to the right people.

Account statements

General ledger reconciliation requires downloading lots of statements from multiple banks. Reconciling your balances and comparing them with your GL takes a lot of time and resources. You can automate the data compilation into specific drives and apps to carry out these reconciliations.

Coupons

Oddly enough, coupons aren’t a common topic discussed in the real estate industry. Still, they can help you boost sales, and RPA is great for coupon creation and management. You can create and process requests using RPA scripts. Naturally, all previous functions also apply here.

Finding GL mismatches

General ledger code comparisons with your budgets can be a challenge even for experienced resources. That’s why mismatches aren’t rare at all, which occur when your GL code isn’t on your budget despite showing in your templates. RPA highlights these exceptions within your Excel sheet for correction.

Account updates

Entering a wrong number or holder name for a bank account is a common mistake. A nice RPA implementation for your company is correcting this entry within your property management software. RPA can compare this information with bank statements and correct accordingly.

Payment corrections

Speaking of correcting, RPA can also correct wrong payments. If you’ve sent money to a wrong destination, automation scripts can validate these entries in your general ledger. It uses posts and bank intimation to revise your transactions properly.

Real estate companies and RPA implementation

RSM has another interesting article on RPA and how commercial real estate companies have been implementing it. It does a great job at pointing out the need to improve back office efficiency and how RPA can help streamline automatable tasks in your company.

RPA is excellent for automating tasks based on repetition and referring to information in a database. That means processes like reconciliation and audits are perfect candidates for automation in the real estate sector. However, payments, financial reports, and protocol testing are equally useful tasks for automation.

AIMultiple points out several examples of how companies are implementing RPA right now.

Application creation

Creating applications for your tenants can be tedious and time-consuming. That can lead to subpar customer experience and losing prospective tenants to your competition. RPA can automate this task thanks to its rule-centric approach, with variables and triggers.

Background checks

Knowing your tenants’ background is vital for both residential and commercial real estate. You should assess criminal backgrounds to determine whether or not it’s a risk to take them into your property. However, background checks also include experiences with previous landlords and compliance with agreements.

Verification

Tenant approval

The reason for all those previous steps is to know whether you should approve or deny your potential tenant. This process is entirely based on rules: if a condition is met, an action occurs. We’ve personally helped companies with scripts that assess the relevant information about their prospective tenants and approve or deny their application accordingly.

Reminders

Late payments are one of the annoying realities of real estate. Automating payment reminders is, understandably, one of the most common automation tasks requested by property managers. Bots can compare incoming payments with payee data to spot who needs a reminder.

Management

Managing your portfolio is vital to maintain the value of your assets. That means selling, buying, and managing your portfolio components accordingly. RPA lets property managers list properties according to their current status: whether they’re available, rented, or sold. Naturally, updating this information is part of the script.

Calculating NAV

Net asset value calculations are critical if for investment trust assessment. Most of these calculations are easy to automate with RPA scripts, especially tasks like collection and validation of market data. Likewise, bots can also apply these calculations to your funds for better accuracy.

Compliance

Bots can verify customer data among your transactions. This task is necessary for reviewing potential fraud and compliance problems down the line. They can send alerts to request the required KYC information. Another side benefit is minimizing direct interaction with sensitive data, which boosts security.

Financial reconciliation

This process is one of the most popular automation requests we’ve received, which is easy to expect. RPA is a great way to reduce the time it takes to extract the relevant statements and compare them with your ledger. We’ve also mentioned how RPA can compile and upload these statement compilations for manual reconciliation.

Payables and receivables

Finally, processing invoices manually is more than tedious. It takes more resources than most people think it should, and it’s prone to problematic errors. RPA automation, with advanced technologies (like machine learning) lets us automate most processes related to account payables and receivables.

Is RPA worth it today?

As Retransform notes in its RPA in real estate article, foregoing RPA often means losing time and money, or at least not making the most out of your business hours. We can also agree that repetition-based tasks are tedious and frustrating for your employees, and they even take a toll on their motivation and focus.

That can result in costly mistakes as the worst-case scenario. Even if it’s not a significant problem for your company, you can still make better use of that time. You could prepare and relocate your resources towards better opportunities and projects, for instance.

Not implementing RPA won’t kill your company, but the reasons to do so are more prominent than the reasons not to. Real estate works with lots of repetitive and data-dependent processes: financial transactions, agreement reconciliation, balance reconciliation, and more.

That means real estate is a prime industry for reaping the benefits of RPA to their full potential. As the article we mentioned suggests, we can summarize RPA’s advantages into two noticeable improvements.

Better efficiency

In the end, RPA lets you make the most out of the time and resources you have. It frees up your employees to perform more profitable tasks, also contributing to better worker satisfaction.

However, it also eliminates human error if the scripts were set up properly. It guarantees constant results, which provides the predictability you need for optimal scaling.

Easier management

Financial and project management also becomes a lot easier. Having fewer human resources working on repetition-based tasks means allowing management resources to focus on the most relevant projects.

Eliminating human error also means reducing the time spent on revising mistakes. It also makes account reconciliation and audits a lot simpler thanks to predictability and fewer variables.

Why should you implement it right now?

Here, we can talk from experience: most companies think RPA isn’t all that important because of many misconceptions. RPA is often associated with “true” AI and machine learning and “consciousness,” which is a problem.

We can automate a wide range of tasks and processes utilizing AI scripts. They’re basically workflows that allow us to produce algorithms. These algorithms have several variables, conditions, and triggers.

Why are we saying all of that? Because they shed light into two vital considerations.

It's already useful

RPA already covers a lot of ground in what it can automate. We’ve helped dozens of businesses automate countless tasks. We’ve already touched on several RPA automatable processes—and not just from our experience.

Setting up UiPath scripts and integrating them into your management platforms is a lot quicker than you might think. We ensure you don’t have to worry about forgetting important tasks that could disrupt your business down the line.

Speaking of disruption, RPA also offers an invaluable benefit: eliminating human error. Countless companies lose time and money over simple mistakes. With repetitive tasks, it’s easy to lose focus with time. That means your resources are more prone to make potentially costly mistakes.

RPA works nonstop. You don’t have to offer breaks or refreshment to keep it working to its optimal output. It simply produces the results you need, depending on the conditions we feed to the algorithm.

RPA will only become better

The most impressive aspect of RPA’s usefulness today is how primitive it still is. That’s far from a bad thing, by the way. We can attest for its efficiency and how much it can improve your company, and it’s still only on its first steps.

RPA is only going to improve as AI and related technologies develop. With the COVID crisis, we’ve seen rapid improvements to the technology. Implementing RPA early means you’ll be able to grow your company with it.

Early technological adoption is a huge advantage when you do it with technologies that can grow your company noticeably. By the time the majority of the industry starts to catch up, you’ll already be an expert on RPA.

DTLA Buildings Touch-Free Technologies To Bring Back Employees After The Pandemic

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0500

The pandemic has forced several employees to work remotely. With 44% of Americans working from home, busy American streets and offices have become eerily empty. As the pandemic wanes, offices are preparing themselves by using technology to ensure the safety of employees in the workplace.

In downtown LA, Coretrust spent more than $5 million to upgrade their offices so tenants and their employees can feel safe to return to work. These upgrades include air filtration systems, elevators, and robots.

Technologies used by Coretrust

Touchless offices are going to be the new normal after Covid 19. To keep up with the same, Coretrust has implemented new back-to-work strategies for their building in LA.

Touchless technologies work through voice recognition, physical movements, and facial recognition. Using biometric technology and IoT, systems can process these inputs and take the right actions. From entering the office to going back, they aim to make the whole process touch-free.

Employee check-ins

The very first step to ensure a contactless office is to minimize contact between front desk staff and other employees. Every company should prioritize the reduction of touching contaminated surfaces like elevators and door handles.

Coretrust has automized all check-ins right from parking lots to elevators. As an employee enters the parking lot, they need to wave a key card. A scanner reads the details and allows the employee in.

Similarly, an elevator having minimal buttons will take the employees directly to their selected floor.

Robots

From disinfecting to transferring goods, companies are depending on robots to make their offices touchless. Coretrust has leased three robots called the Adibots to disinfect the place.

These robots are six feet tall and weigh around ninety pounds. They work by emitting UVC radiation that can deactivate the RNA of viruses. A report by the FDA shows that UVC radiation works on SARS-Coronavirus, and may be effective on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is responsible for Covid 19.

The company plans to deploy these robots in potentially contaminated areas like restrooms during the night, and a few times during the day. Adibots take around 3 minutes to disinfect a 1000-foot room. Each robot costs them $15 per day.

Air Filtration Systems

When used with other practices, air filters are known to reduce airborne contaminants. When used along with source control and proper ventilation, they can reduce small particles which contain viruses. Coretrust has upgraded the air filtration system of the 48-floored building, which circulates fresh air to all its floors.

Why Should Companies Focus on Touchless Technologies?

Covid-19 has brought several practices into our lives such as washing hands frequently and wearing masks. But this isn’t enough when you want to bring back employees to the workplace. To fight these problems, tech firms are coming up with innovative processes that can make the workplace safer.

Using sanitizers and disinfectants can kill germs, but they can take as long as 10 minutes to work. An average air filtration system can’t filter out aerosols, hence they need upgrades. These methods aren’t practical for large office spaces and commercial buildings.

Only recent advancements are making contactless spaces a reality. Now is the time when the world needs touchless technology more than ever.

Why can Touchless Technologies Be Used?

Several technological applications can make many office processes safe for employees. A few technologies you can implement are:

Entrances

Employees can seamlessly enter office spaces by verifying their credentials through contactless scanners. You can use facial recognition, voice recognition, and even mobile phones to let the employees get in. Mobile phones are also more secure as you can use encrypted information and multifactor authentication on employee information.

Elevators

Infrared detectors can sense physical movements without the need to be touched. These work especially well in elevators. Using infrared panels, employees only need to hover their hands over these panels to allow them entry or take them to the right floor. They can also be used in congestion indicators, allowing you to enforce social distancing norms.

Breakrooms

Break rooms are sometimes the most crowded places in an office. Many companies are attempting to make their break rooms virus-free by introducing innovative coffee machines. These machines require their users to hover their hands over the desired option. This reduces the spread of viruses among people using the same machines.

Break rooms also need to be regularly disinfected, which can be done using robots.

Door Knobs and Handles

These places are frequently touched and harbor several germs. Caretakers may not be able to disinfect these places as frequently and hence, reduction in usage of doorknobs and handles should be a priority. A popular method includes using QR code scanners. Each employee can be assigned a unique QR code that can be scanned at entrances.

Another method is to use gesture recognition. This is a fast and efficient system where users only need to wave to unlock doors, which can prevent potential bottlenecks at entrances.

This not only lets them access areas without coming in contact with germs but also reduces the work for maintenance workers.

Restrooms

Touching the taps defeats the purpose of washing hands as the knobs might harbor viruses. Touchless taps and soap dispensers are utilized in many buildings to provide better sanitization to users. They also help keep costs in check and reduce wastage by dispensing the right amount of soap.

Implement Touchless Technology for Your Workplace

Touchless technology has become a priority to create safe workplaces. Hands-free access to areas, disinfecting robots and automated restrooms will soon be the new norm. Just like Coretrust, several other companies are looking for innovative technologies and software to make their buildings contactless.

With the right software, you can seamlessly implement these technologies in your workplace. Whether you want to create digital check-ins or AI-assisted verifications, Assetsoft can help you find the right tools. Automate your maintenance schedules, utilize workplace platforms and security systems to make your office contactless. Using various platforms like Yardi, Procore, and MRI, Assetsoft can build software as per your requirements.