Artificial intelligence could replace up to 800 million jobs in the next ten years, according to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute. One of the "threatened" positions is that of accountants and bookkeepers, and the so-called automation of accounting has been talked about more and more recently. What is it really like - and should people in accounting departments really be afraid that robots will replace them in the office?
Systems replacing routine work
While ten years ago, accountants and billers were indispensable in every company, today their jobs are starting to change. A significant part of their work can be automated – for example, according to this study, artificial intelligence can replace up to 40% of the work that people in accounting departments usually do. This process is technically called Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
A typical example of the work that technology can do for an invoicer is the transcription of documents into a corporate system. Let's not take into account EDI communication , which companies across industries use for goods documents and is at the forefront of data transfer between corporate systems. Its limitation is the technical readiness of the business partner.
There are programs on the market that can so-called "extract invoice data" - that is, read out accounting data from the invoice, such as the name of the customer (supplier), the date of the taxable transaction or the item of goods - and upload them to the corporate system. All this regardless of whether the supplier sends the invoice physically by post, by email as a PDF or perhaps as a photographed image.
The invoicing clerk does not have to slavishly rewrite each invoice, but checks whether the program has read and recorded all the data correctly. In order to avoid the need to set up an individual template for each invoice (which is a common procedure with outdated OCR systems ), artificial intelligence is used, which is able to find individual fields on its own.
For example, 3E PROJEKT, a company that specializes in property renovations and rentals, has had recent experience with a similar system (iNVOiCE FLOW) . "As our business grows, so does the number of invoices received. Thanks to automation, we didn't have to fill two new jobs for people who would just copy documents. We also eliminated human errors and we no longer need to physically store invoices. We have them in iNVOiCE FLOW in an electronic archive," says Renáta Pavičová , Director of the Finance and Assets Department (and Accountant of the Year 2019).
>> Read the full 3E PROJECT case study <<
If a company receives hundreds or thousands of invoices every month (and manually transcribing each invoice takes, for example, three minutes), such a system will save the invoicer tens to hundreds of hours of work. Every month. To this must be added the time savings in communication regarding invoice approval, when in the traditional process suppliers ask about payments for their invoices, it is necessary to search for approvers and so on.
The invoicers are sounding the alarm. Needlessly.
However, experience with implementing similar systems in companies has been mixed so far. While company owners are enthusiastic about the time-saving potential, accountants and billers themselves often oppose such solutions. They are simply afraid that the system will take away their work and they will become unnecessary for the company.
However, in practice, it turns out that artificial intelligence does not take away accountants' work, but rather transforms it. Robots are not intended to replace anyone, but only to make their work easier. Thanks to similar systems, accountants and billers do not have to perform boring routine activities that do not develop them in any way, and they can devote the saved time to more noble activities - for example, optimizing the tax burden, monitoring cash flow, analytics or, in the case of sales representatives, to business activities. Robots only prepare data and numbers, but only people can create ideas and thoughts from them that have real value for the company.
The automation of accounting will thus benefit the entire field. Automatic invoice extraction or, for example, the rapidly developing electronic data interchange (EDI) will completely eliminate unnecessary work with paper documents, slavish transcription of data into systems, or lengthy communication with suppliers and customers from the work of invoicers and accountants. The job will be more prestigious, and therefore better financially rewarded.
But people in accounting have to adapt to this. Set higher standards for themselves, improve, educate themselves. The world is changing rapidly and people have to change with it – including accountants and billers.
Interested in learning more about the topic? Register for the free Webinar on Automation in Accounting .
Systems suitable for partial accounting automation:
- ORiON EDI - solution for electronic exchange of structured documents between business partners
- iNVOiCE FLOW - a tool for automating the processing of received invoices
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