By Kevin Casey – Finance is commonly mentioned as a business unit ripe with opportunities for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It makes sense: RPA is often a fit for repetitive, high-volume, computer-based tasks. Finance is full of those, from invoice processing to financial reporting and plenty more.

When Gartner interviewed more than 150 corporate controllers last year about RPA, the vast majority (88 percent) said they expected to have some form of RPA implementation in place in 2020. By Gartner’s count, a corporate finance department could save its accounting team around 25,000 hours of manual rework each year caused by human error each year in their financial reporting processes alone. That 25,000 hours of rework costs a company with a 40-person accounting team $878,000 annually, according to the research firm.

You can zoom in from 30,000 feet and see this phenomenon at the ground level. Tom Thaler, senior product manager, ARIS at Software AG, tells us that one of the firm’s customers in France (one of the world’s largest energy suppliers) expects 45 percent of all its financial transactions will be automated this year. That’s a result of an RPA project that used process mining to identify bottlenecks and automation opportunities in its financial transaction processes. Read On: