With thousands of transactions flowing through your business each week, accurate and speedy bank reconciliation is critical to your reporting close process.
You may now work with several banks, across multiple continents and currencies, together with multiple ERP systems which has complicated the reconciliation process even further.
This is where AccessPay provides the next step beyond RPA in speeding the month end close process.
Is RPA the answer to statement retrievals?
Often as corporates look to streamline their manual processes, they turn to a certain type of automation to create shortcuts.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) works by programming so-called ‘bots’ to complete data-heavy tasks. It is coded to perform that task, in that way, until told otherwise.
Finance teams most often use RPA to log into their banks, download bank statements, extract transactions and balances and then enter these into the ERP.
This frees up time and eliminated monotonous manual work.
By implementing RPA, you have improved your financial capability and overall workflow – but that’s not the end of it. There are still key limitations to this approach.
A closer look under the bonnet of RPA
If any part of that process changes, whether it’s the format of the data from the bank or you add or close a bank account, the ‘bot’ falls down.
Not literally. But it does mean that a developer will need to tweak the bespoke code behind the automation to get it working again.
This is because the ‘bot’ does not understand the numbers it is moving from one system to another. It is just doing what you told it to do.
Now imagine that happening at several different touch points across your global organization; it means firefighting on a huge scale.
Relying on RPA entirely carries extra risk, if the person who wrote the code moves on it’s difficult to maintain and if you use a large ‘plug and play’ provider you will still need training on how to use the software.
Internal audit are well aware of the risks of RPA and businesses who are utilising RPA need to declare it on their internal risk assessment forms.
So, it’s fair to say that RPA is a useful part of a solution, but it’s not all of it.
Instead, we believe RPA is a stop gap for a truly digital bank connection, provided by organisations like AccessPay who work in partnership with your banks.
A ‘level-up’ worth investing in
AccessPay is a direct digital link between you as a corporate business and your banks.
Using a truly digital connection means that you are connecting directly to your bank, over a secure, audited and controlled link.
By using our platform to extract the statement data needed for reconciliation, it is not only super-fast, but it is also more secure and without the pitfalls of bespoke RPA.
Instead of programming bots to carry out individual tasks, we provide a full end-to-end integrated solution.
So how does it work?
Firstly, the AccessPay platform enables the automatic retrieval of bank statement information as we connect directly with your banks.
At it’s heart AccessPay operates a data model which uses the standard the whole banking industry is moving to – ISO 20022.
AccessPay actually understands the data it is being sent by your banks, so it can spot errors and missing data before transforming the data in to an ERP-ready file.
The platform deals easily with all the quirks and issues that would cause a ‘bot’ to fall over.
Because AccessPay can understand the data sent by your banks, it can transform that data into a format that your ERP or reconciliation systems can understand – removing the need for any human intervention.
Another bonus is the increased cash visibility, as our user interface allows customers to view the data.
“AccessPay provide a full end-to-end integrated solution and is the next iteration of automation. Our solutions lead the fourth generation of finance transformation by connecting those disparate systems and banks for an integrated, more efficient, more secure future of finance.” Anish Kapoor, CEO
