How RPA Automates Bank Reconciliation Statement Process

Prominently, accounting teams of most companies have to deal with Bank reconciliation-a tedious, high volume, and time-consuming process that comes around every month. It requires downloading, reviewing, validating, and reconciling lakhs of bank transactions, and updating the company's balance sheet regularly.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes as a lifesaver in automating one of these most critical tasks of bank reconciliation by extracting the relevant documents and data including ERP software, accounts payable and accounts receivable systems, general ledger, Excel spreadsheets, purchase orders, bank statements, and other data formats. RPA bot matches them in real-time, completes reconciliations, and flag investigation in case of discrepancies. In addition, the general ledger, and balance sheets are automatically updated with proposed adjusting entries in real-time. As a result, financial records are matched with high accuracy and cost-efficiency.

What Are The Most Prominent Challenges In Manual Account Reconciliation Process

Every company makes financial transactions from hundreds to lakhs per month. If your accountants reconcile your accounts at the end of the month manually, it can take several weeks to complete the process. And it’s not even tiresome yet cost prohibitive for an employee to complete the process regularly. This is mainly due to the multitude of account types, financial institutions, payment types, time zones, and payment complexities they deal with. Here are the most prominent challenges of the Account Reconciliation Process:

• Manage day-to-day huge volume of transactions
• Resource exhausting process
• Slow data input and error-prone process
• Surrounding complexity of financial rules makes the process more critical
• Maintaining compliance with the financial standards
• Discrepancies in the data due to manual process
• Duplicate entries
• Lack of standard reporting and auditing formats
• Manual errors during reconciliation
• Multiple transactions in a single invoice

By the right use of an Intelligent Document Processing solution inbuilt with cognitive capabilities like OCR, ML, AI, and RPA is capable of analyzing and evaluating a high volume of data like bank financial records. RPA bots can perform repeatable, high-volume tasks with zero room for error – faster with high accuracy, and effectiveness.

Key Benefits of RPA for Bank Statement Reconciliation

By employing RPA technology, your organization can free human resources from tedious, high volume, and repetitive tasks, freeing them to work on higher-value tasks. An automated solution like RPA can improve the integrity of financial statements while expediting reconciliations and limiting the risks inherent in manually maintaining a company's balance sheet. Here are some key advantages that RPA offers to its users:

Turnaround Time Reduction- Complete the process 70% faster than the manual execution time.

Higher Accuracy – Performed all actions based on predefined business rules without error.

Audit and Compliance – Accessing the RPA Audit trail, you can keep a track of all transactions being performed by the bot, hence, adhering to internal as well as external compliance.

Extract Data From Multiple Sources- Extract data from bookkeeping records, excel spreadsheets, purchase orders, bank statements, and other data formats in real time.

Cost Reductions- Digital bot can simultaneously detect any fraud and cash manipulations to validate financial records on multiple accounts. It results in streamlined workflow and reduced time to financial closure each month.

If you want your finance department to no longer to spend hours doing manual data entry and reconciling purchase orders, then incorporating RPA is the most cost-effective and efficient automation solution. Please contact us at marketing@essindia.com to know more about ESS’ RPA Services!