Traditionally accountants ensure there is enough fat in their billing model to cover the background admin, but imagine if you tightened up the process driven activities? There would be room to add so much more value and in turn increase billable time. Imagine decreasing the cost to invoice from pounds to pennies? Imagine being able to trust that a clients details have been updated in all systems when they change and there are no errors. Let's talk Practice Automation and Practice Gateway.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has the ability to truly transform business practice and processes. It can remove that layer of inefficient, costly tasks that are often open to errors and inaccuracies. Naturally humans are not good at repetitive processes and consistent behaviour in doing tasks. Virtual Workers are the perfect candidate for simply that; cost effective, reliable, consistent work and governed by rules not emotion.
There is no shortage of buzzwords going around at present like artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, and blockchain and each will have an impact within the accountancy sector. RPA is the one that really standouts as something that right now could make a real impact. You could read this, take an action to learn more and in a matter of weeks could be seeing real business and bottom line benefits. All the while it has relativity minimal impact to the employees, apart from freeing up their time and no impact to the systems they use. Virtual Workers can interact with the most recent technologies to the most archaic legacy system.
Accountants and many other professional services, rely on teams of people to complete manual tasks for business processes, such as reviewing, gathering, inputting data between systems, products and portals. The industry is a spreadsheet haven of heavy lifting manual tasks.
You may hear people talk of RPA but here at T-Tech we are talking about the next stage of RPA; Intelligent Automation, it doesn't need a rigid process where information is required in a defined format. It has the intelligence to understand natural language and sentiment in a variety of formats. At that point it can follow clear instructions on how to proceed. It can have accuracy settings to determine how much leniency you want the Virtual Worker to have and it can be instructed to interact with a human where there is doubt. One of great things about this kind of intelligent technology, is the economy of scale that you can achieve. This worker can operate 24/7, repeating the same job and never tire or do it wrong but it can also jump from one task to another. Imagine having an employee who could field service tickets 8-6 pm in one department and then move into another department to upload invoices into your systems 6-8 am. Give that person employee of month!
At this point if you are picturing the room of IT developers you will need to employ instead, then remove this vision. This technology works by following a process map and does not require complex coding. You could run this in your business same as any software and as long as someone can convey the process steps then the Virtual Worker can follow them. The technology is very secure and does not hold any of your data, it simply interacts with the systems exactly as an employee would. Except this employee doesn't require a lunch break. We sound like right bunch of task masters, but really we want the humans in our customers business' to be doing the valuable work, enjoying their lunch break and making an impact.
This is a really exciting time for all business and the forward thinking companies we work with are excited to leverage the opportunity. If this is something you want to understand more about and are considering embarking on this exciting step to realise the significant advantages, get in touch.