Robotic process automation

What it means

RPA is a software robot that drives other programs the way a person would: it opens a screen, copies a field, clicks a button, saves a file. It works on the surface of applications, which is why it turns up wherever a system offers no interface to connect to.

It is neither artificial intelligence nor an integration. The robot follows a fixed script and a changed screen layout stops it; where an API exists an integration is cheaper and sturdier, and RPA is the answer only where there is no interface at all.

What separates the robot from a workflow system is that it controls nothing. The workflow decides who approves what and in which order; the robot merely performs a single step in a person’s place. In practice the two are often combined: the workflow assigns and records the task, the robot processes it and hands the result back.

How it works in practice

In a bookkeeping practice the robot downloads statements from banking portals, sorts and renames documents, moves OCR output into the system, checks VAT numbers against VIES and sends out reminders. Each of these is a task with a clear rule and a large number of repetitions.

Before it goes live the process has to be written down as a process map, the exceptions listed, and the robot given an owner who maintains it. A robot inherits the process it copies, so document digitisation without tidying the original merely multiplies the errors faster.

When we deploy a robot for payment matching, for the first weeks it runs alongside a person and the results are compared. Only once they agree does it take over the routine, passing people just the exceptions, such as payments without a variable symbol that have to be allocated by hand in the open items ledger.

What to watch out for

The robot runs under one person’s access, typically the bookkeeper’s banking or portal login. The day that person leaves and the access is closed, every run stops, usually in the middle of a month-end close, and the log credits each step to someone who did not take it.

A bank or government portal changes its layout without warning and the robot either stops or, worse, carries on and writes data into the wrong fields. Without a control total at the end of each run and an audit log, the error surfaces only at reconciliation and fixing it takes longer than the robot ever saved.