RPA and Smart Automation
Case Studies

The Accounting Department of an International Retail and Manufacturing Company’s sub-brand is responsible for recording and applying cash transactions for each month. The SAP payment processing engine requires all cash transactions for each day of the month to be applied by the first business day of the following month – a process that requires a SME to download the retailer’s monthly transaction data, create a spreadsheet to record daily transactions, and manually apply the cash for each transaction.

In total, this manual process takes three hours of each workday to complete but can often require the SME to dedicate even more time to the process if purchases were made with credit cards from non-major issuers, leading to a backlog in payment processing for the manufacturer’s other vendors. The objective for automating this process was to eliminate backlog while reducing error rate and employee fatigue.

1. Bot logs into the virtual machine (VM) and downloads the transaction files and bill summaries from the vendor’s local system.
2. Bot downloads the monthly transaction summaries from SAP and from the retailer’s local database, then creates spreadsheets for testing.
3. After collecting and organizing the transaction data, the Bot checks for variances in the spreadsheets. The Bot logs any discrepancies between what SAP indicates has been billed versus the amount actually billed. Any variances are sent to the SME to reconcile.
4. After any variances have been notated and reconciled, the Bot updates the monthly transaction activity table to match the current date and updates the CashApp spreadsheet in the same manner.
5. The Bot then updates the Settled Sales, Settled Refunds, Fees, Manuals, Chargebacks, and Corporate orders on the CashApp sheet. If required, a member of the accounting team can initiate price adjustments on the CashApp sheet.
6. Bot sends both the SAP sale testing spreadsheet and the CashApp spreadsheet to accounting for verification. Once a SME verifies, the Bot is sent an email to apply the cash in SAP.
7. The Bot “reads” the confirmation email from accounting and applies the cash in SAP, then updates the CashApp spreadsheet to reflect the cash amount applied.
8. The Bot repeats steps 1-7 for every transaction of the month until the ‘Not Assigned’ value is 0.0, indicating cash has been applied for all transactions. The SME then saves the updated cash application sheet for accounting records.

The client saw major man-hour savings with Accelirate’s automated solution, which takes only 30 minutes to process an entire month of transaction data. Automating this process also eliminated the risk of human error for the accounting team, ensuring accuracy while minimizing business risk.