Organizations everywhere want to know how they can improve their operations today. Better processes behind the scenes help set the stage for even more meaningful work toward the company’s mission. A successful business vision depends on teams that can execute common practices well—and that’s especially true for the financial processes that underpin everything. At a time when every advantage counts, embracing RPA now can prove very valuable.

Robotic process automation isn’t a brand-new technology, but it’s playing an increasing role in financial processes because of its maturity. RPA and its ability to integrate into other workflows, including higher-level intelligent automation, is a potent tool. With solutions from Tungsten Automation, you can unleash a powerful transformation in the way you work.

Let's begin by considering what makes RPA such a useful resource, then examine the impact it can have.

The factors driving RPA adoption today

Many elements of the modern workplace create a demand for reliable RPA. Scale is chief among these factors. At a certain level, “more personnel” is not always the solution to a workflow problem. Not only does that mean ballooning payroll and office costs, but it might also not generate the expected results. Many hands don’t always make light work of complex tasks.

Instead, RPA can work in tandem with skilled human knowledge workers. RPA can execute rules-based tasks rapidly, without deviation or error, all the time. Day or night, you can keep some processes running without human input. Combining supervised and unsupervised RPA can break complex tasks into more manageable routines.

What does that mean for the impact of RPA on financial work?

Reimagine the art of data extraction.

Extracting data is one of the most fundamental but time-consuming efforts in financial processes such as accounts payable. Invoices, receipts, checks, packing slips, and more must all coexist with your digital systems. However, getting that data reliably isn’t always easy. With the power of RPA combined with cognitive automation solutions such as Tungsten Transformation, you can build automated workflows that produce highly accurate data.

Using RPA, software robots can retrieve documents from many sources for analysis. Those sources might be legacy systems, email, websites, desktop applications or other locations. RPA then hands this document off to solutions that use AI-powered cognitive capture to identify, classify and extract the information. RPA can move that data around for you, too.

The intersection of these solutions opens the door to automation that improves over time. You can even set up your system to “understand” the documents specific to your financial processes by training cognitive tools on them.

The Tungsten Marketplace features a solution that simplifies this process. With the Document Set Builder, you can rapidly split large volumes of document data into “training” and “validation” sets. Allow models to train on your data, then test them on validation data to produce generalization capabilities. The result: a smarter process that knows your work.

Automated data extraction reduces errors that cause headaches for AP teams. You can instead enjoy quality information in your systems faster. With RPA assistants, financial workers can move on to major process steps sooner.

Rapidly enhance reconciliation processes.

Reconciliation is critical for maintaining an accurate understanding of your company’s financial health. However, it can be a tedious and highly manual process. RPA offers more opportunities to streamline efforts here, too. With RPA, retrieving and comparing data from many distinct sources is simple. You can build a process that assists agents in reconciling accounts and even posts updates to your general ledger.

Streamline report generation and locate key insights.

Are there places in your financial processes where improvements are possible or even necessary? You need to understand what’s happening, how fast it happens and the quality of the outcome. RPA tools help power dashboards that can provide you with real-time process insights.

These dashboards can help you assess elements such as outstanding invoices, average processing times, accounts aging and cost per invoice. Use these tools to generate detailed reports revealing new places to deploy RPA or other intelligent automation. Gain more insight into cash flow and opportunities for payment discounts.

Discover all that’s possible with cognitive automation today.

The automation revolution is well underway and will continue well into the future. With new advances happening constantly, businesses should seize the opportunity to harness that power today. Platforms such as Tungsten RPA deliver the robust functionality and reliability you need in mission-critical financial workflows. Adding Tungsten Marketplace solutions to extend the impact of your investment translates into less time before you achieve a positive ROI.

Evaluate how RPA could impact your business today. Consider where process shortcomings could hold you back. Prepare to take your next steps, then unleash the power of modern automation on your business.