Reporting is the lifeblood of business intelligence. Companies rely on data aggregation, analysis, and distribution to gain insight, make forecasts, track performance, ensure compliance, and guide strategic decisions. However, manual reporting processes are notoriously tedious, error-prone, and time consuming. Employees tasked with gathering data from multiple systems, creating reports, and disseminating findings often spend more time struggling with tools and formats than deriving and communicating meaningful business insights.
Fortunately, robotic process automation (RPA) promises to revolutionize reporting by removing many of the mundane, repetitive tasks that have plagued the process to date. As leaders look to leverage automation to unlock efficiency and productivity gains, RPA emerges as an obvious solution for streamlining reporting.
The Promise and Potential of Automated Reporting
RPA bots excel at the types of routine, rules-based processes involved in reporting workflows such as:
- Data Collection: Logging into platforms and systems, scraping data, compiling inputs
- Report Generation: Importing data, manipulating spreadsheets, creating visualizations
- Distribution: Emailing reports, saving files to databases, updating dashboards
By handling repetitive, manual work, RPA allows humans to focus their efforts on higher value analysis and interpretation rather than data wrangling. The benefits don’t stop there…
Efficiency and Productivity
Automating time-intensive reporting tasks allows teams to deliver more timely insights with existing resources. Bots can rapidly gather, process, and communicate exponentially more data than any individual. RPA also enables 24/7 productivity by allowing reporting to run outside of normal business hours.
According to a survey of over 400 financial professionals by accounting firm CFO Dive, organizations leveraging RPA for reporting realized:
- 69% improvement in report turnaround times
- 63% reduction in error rates
- 58% cut in reporting costs
These dramatic efficiency and accuracy gains unlock tremendous value. With RPA, leaning teams gain capacity to take on more strategic initiatives rather than getting mired in reporting busywork.
[[Insert graph showing survey findings]]Improved Accuracy
Manual processes inevitably lead to errors that undermine reporting accuracy. Fatigued or distracted employees may input erroneous data, select the wrong parameters, or make mistakes while manipulating datasets. Robots sidestep human limitations to produce consistent, auditable work with incredible precision.
In a study published in the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, researchers found that RPA adoption led to a near total elimination of errors across key financial reporting processes including account reconciliations, journal entry testing, and inventory analyses.
Faster Insights and Decision Making
With RPA accelerating reporting cadences, leaders can gain visibility into emerging trends and make strategic decisions based on more current information rather than outdated snapshots. Access to frequent, high-quality reporting provides tremendous competitive advantage.
Leading organizations are combining RPA with analytics and AI to enable continuous monitoring and forecasting. Rather than relying on snapshots, decision makers gain access to real-time dashboards and dynamic projections based on latest data thanks to seamless automation.
RPA Use Cases for Business Reporting
RPA use cases abound across reporting subdomains:
Financial Reporting
From accounts payable to tax preparation, bots can compile inputs, run complex calculations, populate templates, reconcile ledgers, ensure compliance, and distribute findings. RPA enables faster closes, continuous auditing, and overall streamlining of financial reporting.
Specifically, leaders leverage RPA to automate:
P&L Statements: Pulling data from financial systems, ERPs, and other inputs to automatically populate monthly/quarterly P&L reporting. Real-time visibility unlocks better forecasting.
Cash Flow Reporting: Connecting billing, AR, AP, payroll, purchasing, and other systems to assemble dynamic cash flow statements. Critical for liquidity management.
Balance Sheet: Compiling account balances, reconciliations, fixed asset registers, inventory data, and more into balanced financial statements with drill-downs into discrepancies.
Auditing / Compliance Reporting: Applying rules engines to continuously audit transactions, journal entries, taxes, and all facets of financials to ensure adherence to standards in real time.
Early RPA adopters in financial services are realizing game-changing ROI:
- Global bank HSBC recouped RPA implementation costs for financial reporting in under 6 months
- Leading accounting firm KPMG achieved 50% faster report turnaround along 75% reduction in errors
As more finance teams follow suit, expect accelerated consolidation, close, and compliance processes thanks to hands-off automation. RPA finally brings the promise of continuous accounting and auditing to fruition after decades of manual reporting processes failing to keep pace with regulatory demands.
Business Intelligence Reporting
Thanks to RPA, business leaders can garner intelligence more quickly and accurately. Bots compile customer, product, marketing, and operations data into digestible dashboards and automated updates.
Rather than waiting weeks or months for snapshots of performance, key business metrics can be gathered, structured, analyzed, and pushed to decision makers daily or in real time. The volume of data that can be synthesized is unmatched using manual approaches.
Critical use case examples include:
Customer Intelligence: Connecting CRM, email, e-commerce, and other touchpoints to uncover profile trends, retention drivers, satisfaction metrics, lifetime value cohorts, and more to inform engagement strategy and product development
Marketing Analytics: Comparing campaign expenses across channels, measuring ROI of various promotions and assets, tying tactics to pipeline and revenue, monitoring share of voice/traffic vs. competitors to optimize spending
Supply Chain Analytics: Tracking procurement patterns, inventory, logistics, and fulfillment metrics to guide sourcing, production planning, and demand forecasting while surfacing bottlenecks
IT Monitoring: Pulling user adoption statistics, system performance metrics, help desk ticket analysis, and cybersecurity indicators to enable data-driven IT management and strategy planning
The use cases are endless. If your organization currently relies on manual reporting processes, RPA presents the opportunity to enable continuous, expansive, and dynamic business analytics at a level never before seen. The acceleration RPA enables eclipses traditional reporting the way email outpaced written memos for communication.
HR and People Reporting
Automating talent analytics unlocks workforce insights. RPA compiles headcount metrics, demographics, compensation analysis, retention statistics, training metrics and more into dynamic reports.
While HR teams often aim to take a data-driven approach, manual reporting rarely lives up to the vision in practice. Instead, snapshots fail to keep pace with change. RPA finally makes continuous workforce analytics possible by connecting HRIS systems, pulling payroll and PTO data, aggregating learning system statistics, and blending in cost center inputs to deliver holistic people insights.
Key examples include:
Turnover Reporting – Monitoring separation drivers, exit interview sentiment, manager satisfaction scores, productivity metrics, and other indicators that may inform proactive retention programs rather than reactive responses
Recruiting Analytics – Understanding vacancies by team and position, source of hire and quality of candidate by channel, offer acceptance rates, and recruiting process efficiency metrics like time-to-fill to optimize sourcing and hiring practices
Diversity Analytics – Comparing representation at various levels, across teams, aligned to community demographics, and versus industry benchmarks to inform proactive development, advancement, and retention programs elevating underrepresented groups
Compensation Benchmarking – Continuously gather and analyze pay equity controlling for tenure, performance, level, and other factors rather than relying on episodic audits to ensure fairness
Learning & Development Analysis – Connect systems like Cornerstone and Degreed to understand utilization, engagement, completion rates, and efficacy of training programs and pivot approaches in near real-time based on data
As with other reporting domains, automation provides a path to unlock advanced HR analytics delivering previously impossible visibility in support of strategic talent management and better business outcomes.
[[Insert Example Statistical Graphic Showcasing Value of RPA for HR Reporting]]Best Practices for Implementation
While RPA promises immense upside for reporting, simply deploying bots into existing dysfunctional processes will fail to deliver desired outcomes. Organizations looking to make the most of this technology should:
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Conduct Assessments: Thoroughly map current-state reporting workflows and identify top pain points and automation opportunities.
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Standardize and Optimize: Refactor as needed to remove redundancies, inconsistencies, and steps that fail to add value prior to automation.
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Select Solutions: Match reporting needs to RPA platform capabilities and consider total cost of ownership when investing in this emerging technology.
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Define Governance: Establish oversight processes, monitoring procedures, support models, and change protocols.
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Lead Change Management: Win stakeholder buy-in across impacted teams. Address skepticism through training and pilot concept proving.
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Track ROI: Define key metrics aligned to business case and measure against thresholds to inform expansion plans.
Follow these best practices to ensure RPA initiatives achieve maximum strategic impact.
The Future of Automated Reporting
RPA constitutes one of the most promising avenues for unlocking efficiency, productivity, accuracy, and speed within business reporting. As more organizations implement automation, expect heightened performance and newfound visibility into critical business data.
While reporting has historically represented an analytics bottleneck, RPA dissolves data roadblocks through hands-off automation. The technology finally brings the promise of real-time business intelligence and forecasting to fruition.
Leaders embracing RPA will steal a march on competition still mired in manual reporting processes ill-equipped for the pace of modern business. This emerging technology harbors truly game-changing potential to unlock strategic, data-driven decision making.