- AgriFood
- Finance department
Intercompany reconciliations at an international AgriFood organization
The reconciliation of intercompany account statements is a monthly recurring process. When performing the reconciliation process, two statements are checked against one another. When these statements do not match, a lengthy process of scanning for the missing lines awaits. Ciphix offers an RPA solution that fully automates this reconciliation process. As a result, the human operators enjoy freed up time and an increased satisfaction.
Use case: Reconciliation of statements
We were contacted by an international AgriFood organization, consisting of many different companies. Each company has its own, unique reference code. At the end of the month, the account statements made by the organization are reconciled to check if they are in balance. The process is as follows. First, a list of the company codes and partner entity codes are used as input, and are checked against one another. These codes are entered into SAP which then supplies the operator with an Excel sheet. Following this, there are two possible outcomes: either the inputs match, or they do not. In case of a match, an email is sent to the contact person confirming this. However, if there is no match, the operator has to go through each line in the customer statement and check if it matches with the vendor statement. These statements can easily consist of hundreds of lines. The missing line is accrued to an Excel template and also looked up in Basware. If the missing invoice is not in Basware either, an email is sent through SAP to ask the customer for a copy of the invoice.
As you can imagine, this process demands a lot of time and attention. Operators also experience a high level of dissatisfaction during this process. To put it in perspective: if 50 lines are missing in a statement, 50 invoices need to be looked up and 50 emails need to be sent through SAP. Sounds more like a task for a robot, right?
Our solution: 100% automation leads to 0% human interference
The organization reached out to us to assess the potential of automation. We have successfully implemented an RPA solution automating the process of these reconciliations. The only input our robot needs is an Excel file with all intercompany customers and their trading partner codes. The moment the robot is triggered by its human operator, he will start the process and perform the following tasks:
- Retrieve and read input of the Excel file
- Download related customer- and vendor statements from SAP
- Compare balances
- Find all missing invoices
- Search missing invoices in Basware
- Send email to customer through SAP
- Report to business controller
Our robot brings full automation (100%) to the process, thereby saving over 244 hours annually. As a result, no human interference is required anymore. Now that the digital workforce is implemented, no more time is wasted on manually checking account statements and retrieving missing invoices!
