Accounting process automation

Legacy accounting processes are not uncommon for many companies. These processes involve a large number of Excel spreadsheets, sent via email or through a shared repository. All of which require manual effort to prepare and review. Multiplying this time by the number of people involved in preparing the spreadsheets can produce long delays in processing and obtaining approvals. And the more spreadsheets you have, there is a higher likelihood of a human error, leading to potential risk.

All of these reports require consolidation, which creates a new source of delays (possibly days, weeks or months) and more potential risk.

Significant time savings can be found by automating some of the most essential accounting tasks like consolidation, account reconciliation and validation/approvals by accessing data from the most disparate sources. A consistent process for the consolidation, reconciliation and validation of financial data from different source systems can be achieved by automating that process with a set of configurable business rules.

At the same time this process can provide a centralized platform and a single source of truth. This eliminates the need for moving documents in an uncontrolled/unaudited manner and allows for a more streamlined preparation preventing delays in processing.

This would not only save time and money, it will provide accountants with more time for high value activities and less time scrubbing data.

The Problem

Accounting teams are required to consolidate a large amount of financial data from disparate systems and create a centralized dataset. This manual process is time consuming and no standardized rules can be enforced to prepare the data. Most of this data is being processed manually which can create data inconsistencies. 

Accountants spend time compiling numbers and checking formulas instead of using their experience to find undiscovered value in the final reports.

The Solution

Automation Hero can read data from different data sources and automate its consolidation for enrichment and reconciliation. This allows:

1. Standardized data processing
2. Data validation, inconsistency detection and exception handling
3. Creation of a centralized data repository
4. Free up time for accountant creative activities

Through the usage of a human-in-the-loop process accountants are only involved in correcting inconsistencies, not having to revise every single record.

ROI

In a simple use case, where only data is being consolidated and validated, with human intervention to process exceptions, the time to process documents can be reduced up to 5 times. The tangible ROI will depend on the number of documents to process, the size of the staff involved in the processing and the frequency with which this data has to be processed.

The intangible benefit is the time which accountants can invest in activities requiring more human creativity to add value to the reports.