Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for QuickBooks Online

Our Robotic Process Automation journey began with our own accounting processes. It just felt like we were spending a lot of time on mundane, repetitive work. I have often said to our team, "I'm intrinsically lazy. I'd much rather the computer work for us rather than the other way around." After a modest amount of development work, we began to see significant reductions in the time spent generating financial reports and increases in the consistency and accuracy of our operational reporting.

Robotic process automation looks like artificial intelligence but it's not. Interestingly, it does do boring stuff for you. If you're interested in AI, try this first. If you're looking to close the books in days rather than weeks, consider Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for QuickBooks Online (QBO).

RPA for QBO consists of standardized workflows designed to automate specific repetitive data entry tasks. RPA for QBO runs on our Robotic Process Automation as a Service (RPAaaS) platform. No software development is required. You simply select the tasks to be run, provide runtime parameters, and schedule them to run periodically or at a pre – defined time. QuickBooks Online login credentials are stored in a secure password vault, accessed only at setup and run time.

Robotic Process Automation involves the following service components:
Financial Reporting

Financial Reporting

Generating financial reports from QuickBooks Online into a Microsoft Excel workbook each month is tedious and time-consuming. While generating a set of financial statements may only take 15 minutes, creating 50 such Excel workbooks for clients would cost 12.5 hours each month. Further, the manual steps required are repetitive and prone to error. We help clients focus their effort on higher-value tasks by automating the generation of:

  • Profit Loss Statements
  • Balance Sheets
  • Statements of Cash Flow

Operational Reporting

Payroll Data Imports

Importing payroll data into QuickBooks Online is a necessary periodic task. The difficulty is that format of extracted data varies from payroll system to payroll system. Standardized RPA for QBO workflows ensure consistent and accurate loading of payroll data into QuickBooks Online. Standard process automation includes:

  • Downloading data from the payroll system
  • Transforming the data into a QBO-compatible format
  • Loading the reformatted data into QuickBooks Online

Booking Credit Card Transactions

Credit Card and Bank Transactions

Associating credit card and bank transactions with the correct vendor and coding them with the proper G/L account is probably the most tedious and time-consuming month-end task. While this task may only take 15 minutes per cardholder, performing this task for 3 cardholders in 50 clients would cost 37.5 hours per month. We provide clients with standardized RPA for QBO automations to:

  • Download credit card statements
  • Download transactions
  • Transform the transaction data
  • Assign vendor, department code, G/L account
  • Load the transactions into QuickBooks Online
  • Generate spreadsheets

Financial and Operational Reporting

Collections Automation

Nearly every organization expends effort to collect its outstanding accounts receivable. This task often entails generating customer statements, identifying overdue invoices, and sending email to customers requesting payment. This task is usually performed week in and week out as invoices are paid and new invoices are generated in QuickBooks Online. We help clients with standardized RPA for QBO process automations to:

  • Generate customer statements
  • Create A/R aging analysis reports
  • Send email to customers with attached statements and invoice copies

Automated Email Management

Data Warehouse for QuickBooks Online

While there are many standard reports in QuickBooks Online, Executive Teams often need timely, ad hoc reporting of financial and operational data to support sound decision-making. Standardized RPA for QBO process automations are designed to create and maintain a data warehouse for QuickBooks online data. We help clients:

  • Create a data warehouse
  • Extract relevant data from QuickBooks Online
  • Transforming the data to be useful for analysis
  • Load the data warehouse
  • Keep the data warehouse up to date
  • Generate and publish standard and ad hoc reports