What is RPA, and why should you care?

SaaS. FASB. SMART. AIDA. WYSIWYG.

The world of business acronyms can be confusing place. Insiders tend to sling lingo without concern for the outsiders they market to.

In recent years, one term in particular has attracted industry attention. Chatter about RPA—Robotic Process Automation— has reached a fever pitch.

According to CIO magazine, RPA involves the automation of “mundane rules-based business processes.”

Note that the word ‘robotic’ can mislead. RPA is not fully-autonomous AI. Done right, RPA should keep managers in total control. They define which tasks are automated and when. They set the required level of approval, and they retain the ability to intervene when needed.

This bot-human synergy makes RPA ideal for finance. Instead of wasting hours scanning and pasting an invoice, an accountant can simply review, approve, or edit it as necessary.

For most commenters, RPA is breaking news. A CFO article fingers only “three dominant players” in the “burgeoning” RPA market. According to Marie Myers, CFO of UiPath, “There’s only a handful of companies in the world…thinking very creatively” about RPA.

For us at Xledger, hype like this is puzzling. After all, Xledger has been using RPA since 2003, when we first began automating our customers’ bank reconciliation.

Xledger is honored to be in the ‘handful’ of RPA-savvy companies. Really, we are.

But RPA isn’t breaking news around here.

We have spent sixteen years equipping our customers with software automation.

In those 16 years, we’ve automated more processes than any competitor: bank reconciliation, data entry, posting suggestions, invoicing, workflow, global consolidation, and many more.

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If you’d like more info on how RPA could transform your organization, please get in touch.

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