IPA and Accounting Processes

Why Should You Consider Automating Accounting Processes?

Automating accounting business processes has a variety of benefits. It can improve the accuracy and timeliness of financial information and also free up time for more strategic tasks.

Automating processes using software for business accounting allows data entry and reports to be generated quickly and efficiently, with less opportunity for error. Moreover, automation can decrease the risk of fraud and human error, making all the difference in a company’s success.

Automation is also more cost-effective than manual management – requiring fewer labor costs and fewer resources overall.

Ultimately, automated accounting processes have considerable advantages, including improving accuracy, increasing security and reducing costs – making this an essential tool in modern management practices.

What Role Does Intelligent Automation Play?

Intelligent process automation in accounting transforms how accountants and financial professionals work and use software for business accounting. It uses artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA) and natural language processing (NLP) to automate repetitive tasks, leading to greater efficiency, accuracy, and speed with the help of the latest accounting and ERP software.

Benefits of intelligent processing automation in accounting

Intelligent process automation integrated with accounting software helps to eliminate human error, ensuring data accuracy and increasing the accuracy of financial reporting from days or weeks down to just hours.

Moreover, intelligent accounting software for businesses can provide proactive insights that help accountants make more informed decisions, freeing up their time to focus on complex tasks such as strategic planning - improving their overall productivity.

What’s So Intelligent About Intelligent Process Automation?

Today, intelligent process automation (IPA) integrated with business accounting software is transforming the work that accounts payable team members do — empowering them to go beyond data entry and document handling, emailing invoice approvers or calling vendors, to contributing to budgeting, planning and analysis work that adds value to the organization.

IPA-driven accounts payable automation solutions are designed to be flexible enough to function reliably in the real world. With the help of accounting business software, the need to spend hours chasing down AP process errors and exceptions is eliminated.

Why You Must Invest in Intelligent AP Processes

Unlike their less intelligent predecessors, intelligent AP process automation solutions tackle the problem of process exceptions head-on. By applying machine learning to the issue of coding rules for the system to follow, they lead accounting AP process owners to identify and solve for an exception once in a way that allows the system to record those actions and adapt their algorithms to tackle the same issue on their own the next time.

This is a massive breakthrough in business accounting automation that overcomes the challenge of trying to code or configure a rule for every real-world condition. And that’s what’s so new and different about today’s AP accounting automation solutions. Another big difference is that today’s systems embrace new, more intelligent and flexible approaches to integrating ERP, ECM and other business systems.

One of the traditional benefits of AP automation through business accounting software, in general, is the ability to:

1) Validate data through integration with an ERP and
2) Flow data extracted from an invoice or other purchasing document into the ERP to create a payable transaction without any manual data entry.

How do You Avoid Bottlenecks with Upgrading and Integration of ERP Software

One challenge with any accounting software integration in the past is what happens when you make a change to that system (like an upgrade).

Often, companies relying on on-premise accounting and ERP systems remain on their original version of that system because of the risk of breaking an integration point or the cost of maintaining that integration.

Intelligent AP Automation solutions solve problems using modern IPaaS (integration platform as a service) models that are designed to overcome rigid, proprietary accounting software integration solutions that require IT/development overhead to maintain.

IPA in Business Accounting in Action

Chances are, you sense a pattern here when it comes to intelligent process automation. Flexibility, adaptability and reduced dependence on IT/development are the real differentiators when you compare traditional, rules-based systems to today’s more intelligent business accounting software solutions. From a practical standpoint, here’s what that means for your AP team.

In the past, your typical AP staff member would spend a quarter of their time sorting, filing and/or scanning invoices. According to industry benchmarks, a quarter of the time would be spent resolving errors and exceptions. The remaining half of their time would be spent on approvals, coding, ERP transaction entry and payment processing. This meant a huge waste of time and effort in the absence of intelligent and integrated accounting software.

Insert intelligent AP accounting automation into the equation, and those team members save time, reduce costs and can do more meaningful work by relying on the accounting software system to:

• Automatically capture, sort and file AP documents (or batch scanned) in an appropriate system or file folder.
• Rely on the intelligent business accounting system to identify and extract relevant vendor and payment data from an invoice in a way that continually learns and adapts.
• Validate extracted data against ERP/ECM/business system records, flagging errors for assistance from process owners while learning and adapting from any corrections made.
• Automatically routing accounting software data to approvers for G/L coding and approval
• Automatic transaction entry into the accounting software as part of the bigger ERP system, along with digital links to the invoice image and an audit trail of any approvals.

Steps to Ensure Success of Revamping Your Accounting Processes

To ensure the integration of intelligent automation in your accounting and accounts payable in particular, the first step is to take a deep dive into your current processes.

• Identifying areas in your accounting software setup where manual input is required or where manual processes could be replaced with automated ones will help you pinpoint the best opportunities for implementing intelligent automation.
• Once you have identified areas for improvement in your existing accounting software processes, consider implementing tools and technologies that will automate mundane tasks and reduce human error such as optical character recognition, blockchain payments, natural language processing, document OCR scanning and machine learning algorithms.
• Finally, when designing your intelligent automation systems make sure the system is secure with encryption at every level of its operations and that it meets all compliance and regulatory standards.

With these steps in place you can be sure that your accounting system and accounts payable processes are operating efficiently while keeping human errors to a minimum.