Automation Potential in: Cash Management
low Potential to Automate:
Medium Potential to automate:
Forecasting, Monitor banking performance
High potential to automate
Prepare and review daily cash, Perform balance reporting, Collect bank reconciliations, Create and manage reports
Automation Impact Evaluation
Cash flow remains the number one killer of businesses today. For too long forecasting the future has been dependent on old data, but with live data organisations can be better informed.
Prepare and review daily cash
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a tool which interacts with software, systems and the internet as a person would. It can gather and collate information in a matter of seconds making it ideal for daily cash reports.
Balance Reporting
Similarly automation can be used to serve balance reporting with live data. Many of Proservartner’s clients will have a bot feed into a custom dashboard so they can see data in a quick and accessible way but can also be downloaded in whichever format is desirable such as excel.
Forecasting
When correctly implemented, RPA can automatically extract data from an organisation’s ERP or accounts system and feed it directly into the cash forecasting system. With an automated cash forecasting process, as soon as new details become available, data can be refreshed and presented on an intuitive dashboard offering the ability to drill down to the required degree of granularity or roll-up to broad headline numbers. As more, and better quality data becomes available, decision-making and planning are therefore enhanced. Similarly, RPA’s ability to extract data from various sources creates opportunities to improve analytics which in turn enhances the treasury of finance team’s forecasting ability.
Collecting bank reconciliations
Logging onto secure online banking can be a surprisingly time consuming task, especially where multiple branches/verticals have different accounts or banks associated with them. A bot can log in and collect bank reconciliations, automation can then be used for the comparison. Most companies still manually reconcile their balance sheet accounts using Microsoft Excel which has been an accepted method for many years. However, this means that reconciliations are labour-intensive and come under pressure during month-end. Even where businesses are using online accounting tools, time spent on account reconciliation can be dramatically reduced through the use of Robotic Process Automation which will match and verify the information in a matter of seconds.
case Study
Accountancy Firm
Proservartner worked alongside a national accountancy firm who were undergoing a restructure.
A complex process meant that in order to process a transaction, three different departments needed to use five different applications, taking forty minutes each time. On average there were about 10 of these types of transactions a month, which meant six over six hours were being lost on this task.
Proservartner were able to streamline a number of their processes by creating a central archive which stored all remittances. This eliminated the issue facing the AP team which worked with multiple sources of remittance information. We then created a bot using RPA (Robotic Process Automation) which retrieved remittances and extracted the relevant information. Automation was then utilised for the matching up of invoices and payments.
The company saw a return on investment in just five months and the robot had a 0% error rate. We were able to reduce manual effort by 25% and reduce processing time by65%. This improved employee experience by allowing staff to focus on higher-value work, as well as ensured better financial tracking and compliance.