FIRtech CEO Ugan Maistry reveals that CFOs are using digital workers to help automate accounting processes.
Fintech is changing the world of finance at a rapid pace. CFOs are now using digital workers like ReconBot to automate their accounting processes. These tools are helping them to avoid unnecessary losses such as vendor overpayments or revenue leakage from bank accounts.
Automation tools are powerful AI engines with excellent document understanding. They have system integration capabilities that can reconcile any set of information from various sources, whether it’s PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets or system entries to the accounting system.
Reconciliation takes time and effort, but skipping this critical exercise may have dire consequences. Vendor overpayments or revenue leakage from bank accounts could result in huge losses.
Almost everything in life is about reconciling one thing with another. In business, some things are more complex and time consuming to reconcile than others, such as reconciling vendor statements to invoices or bank statements to originating transactions.
These tools do reconciliations, big and small, from automatically reading source documents, to finding the source of imbalance. They can reconcile bank statements to the accounting system, check for suspicious transactions and alert the responsible person in the organisation.
Furthermore, they offer a historical trend of spend per vendor, alerts for first time payments to a new bank account and vendor bank account changes.
Automation, machine-learning and AI-based solutions automatically reconcile any statement, including bank statements, vendor statements and utility statements to any source document or system. One is notified immediately of the transactions, movements or invoices that do not reconcile.
Digital workers are able to mimic repetitive tasks more quickly and accurately and have self-learning AI, with positive and negative reinforcement, that allows them to read, interpret and process documents of all types without prior training (which is a requirement in most other OCR-based technologies).
Their main objective is to improve speed and efficiency whilst reducing risk of unauthorised expenditure. Reconciliation solutions must, however, be capable of handling a large volume of data and be able to sync with multiple external systems without human intervention.
Other applications include reconciliation of municipal bills, toll statements, traffic fines, fuel consumption for fleet operators and tenant statements. In the case of municipal bills, tools like this can check rates, taxes, water and electrical usage and flag variances in consumption or tariffs.
Fleet management is another area that can benefit from these digital workers. They can help fleet owners reconcile vehicle fuel consumption against distance covered and planned routes. They can identify potential fuel pilferage, match toll fees or traffic fines to a vehicle, ensuring that there is an automated bill back to the leasing customer.
