Payment Journal preparation

Usually department managers or the head of the company review outstanding vendor balances and approve/decline payments afterwards processed by accountants.

This specific process requires a spreadsheet with total vendor balances. Each company lists vendors in a separate sheet. This spreadsheet is generated from ERP. When all the approvals are registered, this spreadsheet is passed to accountants who generate payment proposal records that contain data at invoice level, and remove all invoices from declined vendors. As this is quite a time-consuming job when these lists get longer, automation was the obvious solution to save time spent from decision to execution and documentation. Doing this manually is quite slow for two reasons: firstly, a human needs to compare and find numbers in system, which is a slow and error-prone job; secondly, certain actions in ERP that generate the proposed payments take time to make calculations, and users just have to sit and wait.

Now a robot receives the said spreadsheet in an e-mail a couple times a day. It then processes company per company and generates payment journal records containing only the approved invoices. It does also some extra validation. And, of course, if something does not add up between the spreadsheet and ERP balances, such cases are collected in a list and sent to the accountant for manual processing.

Thus the main process is done by robot and only exceptions are handled by people.

RPA teemad: accounting, finance