INDUSTRY: Retail
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Overview Of The Company
The case study revolves around a Fashion Retailer and its Accounting team. Currently, the team engages in a reconciliation process between the point of sale (POS) system and the bank system, and they perform a point of sales to SAP reconciliation only when discrepancies are noticed in totals. The manual reconciliation process requires significant effort, taking about an hour on average. The goal is to develop an SAP automation solution that can identify discrepant transactions from the POS report compared to the SAP report, allowing the team to rectify errors before performing the bank reconciliation.
Challenges
The Accounting team faced several challenges in their reconciliation process. The manual matching of thousands of transactions between the POS report and SAP report was time-consuming and prone to errors. The need to perform reconciliations only after discrepancies were noticed resulted in a reactive approach, causing delays in resolving issues. The process consumed valuable human resources, impacting overall efficiency and productivity.
Solutions
Accelirate developed an end-to-end SAP intelligent robotic process automation solution to address these challenges and streamline the reconciliation process. Here are the key steps of the solution:
- Bot Downloads Reports: The Bot accesses the POS system and SAP, and downloads transaction reports for a specified date range from both sources.
- Bot Formats Data: For each report, the Bot creates a spreadsheet and formats the transaction data with relevant columns such as Store, Transaction Number, Amount, and Tender Type.
- Bot Tests for Differences: The Bot performs a query to identify discrepancies between the POS report and SAP report. It looks for three exceptions: transactions in one report but not the other, transaction amounts that don’t match, and stores that don’t match.
- Bot Generates Report: The Bot consolidates the query results into a report and emails it to the Subject Matter Expert (SME) responsible for reconciliations.
Results
Accelirate’s automated SAP automation solution brought significant improvements and benefits to the reconciliation process. Here are the results achieved:
- Time Saved: The SAP automation solution runs weekly, preemptively identifying errors before the Accounting team performs the bank reconciliation. It takes only 20-30 minutes to process one week’s worth of data and approximately an hour for the entire month’s transaction data. This led to a saving of 15+ monthly man-hours.
- Error Reduction: By automating the reconciliation process, the solution achieved a remarkable 94% reduction in errors, ensuring greater accuracy and reliability in financial data.