, Author at Capto

Capto volunteers automation robots to support Ukraine aid initiatives

Marchela / March 8, 2022

Help us help where automation can speed access to aid

Our reactiveness and our ability as a worldwide society to respond and offer help as quickly as possible to the people of Ukraine have never been more important in modern history.

Like most of Europe, our hearts sunk the moment we heard about the unprovoked and needless invasion into Ukraine. We got shocked, startled, horrified. But as a society, we also got united and are getting stronger and stronger together.

We truly believe that each and every single one of us, both personally and professionally, has a crucial role to play in helping Ukrainians through this sudden nightmare, not only those still at home but also those who’ve now left to call a neighboring country their new home. We believe that when many small and large efforts come together, they truly have the power to impact lives, build roofs above heads, put food back on empty tables, and place a smile on saddened faces. And that is truly incredible!

As a team, we thought quite a lot about how we can help the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and the initiatives and organisations that are currently being created. As such, we decided that for an undefined period of time, we will volunteer our automation robots in support of non-profit projects that have as their purpose to help Ukraine and its people during this horrifying time. Our goal as a team is to speed up processes that are currently done manually which can be automated to increase the speed of response, availability of information, and access to help.

We feel grateful to have connected with two organisations already but in times of urgency, the world needs an equally urgent reaction, so we want to extend our support to more organisations and initiatives across Europe so that help can be offered and accepted by as many people as possible and as quickly as possible too.

So how exactly can we help?

To help as quickly as possible, we are including below a few examples of the activities our robots can do already. This means that with very limited further development if any, we can get a robot to fuel speed in a matter of hours or just a few days:

Automate form completion using data from Excel (or another data source)
Database check & sending of outcome emails
Enrich and transfer data between databases or systems
Website page scraping & consolidation into a database
Download of online documents & send via email
Auto-Generation of documents
Automatic sending of emails/ notifications
Automated download of email attachments & consolidation

The above are just a few examples so please if you are working on a Ukraine aid project and think you could speed up the operations by automating a certain task or process, please do reach out to us to consult and receive one or a few of our robots (completely free).

For a bit more context on the sources where information could come from, please see the list of formats supported below:

Web platforms
Email exchange (IMAP)
Word
Excel
Text file
XML
API

The above are scenarios we can react to pretty quickly but please note that we can help with many other scenarios, and formats too. It’s just that it’ll take us a few days.

If you are working on a non-profit Ukraine support initiative or you know of a project that would benefit from automation to speed things up and increase access to help, please get in touch with us on helpukraine@wearecapto.com or LinkedIn, or kindly share our details with your relevant contacts.

From our entire team at Capto we wish the people of Ukraine and everyone who has opened their hearts, thoughts, and homes for Ukrainians to keep strong, have faith, and stay united.

All Together We Can!

Capto Team

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What is open source RPA: Ultimate Comparison with traditional RPA

Marchela / March 7, 2022

What is open source RPA?

Before we dive into open source RPA, let’s briefly discuss Robotic process automation (RPA) more generally. RPA is often the first step toward automation for many businesses. Often businesses look no further to automate manual, multistep tasks that typically take a human a long time to complete. However, RPA as a technology is evolving quickly. This means that it can now handle with perfection not only swivel-chair processes but also end-to-end process automation.

RPA has the power to significantly increase the volume of business you attend to. It’s also powerful in fueling innovation and creativity in teams. And sure, it’s also got the potential to reduce costs by 30% to 50%.

With the increasing need for automation, the discussion about what type of RPA to implement becomes more and more topical. So here’s a summary of two main categories of RPA on the market today. Open source and closed, or traditional, RPA.

Open source RPA is robotic process automation where software robots are built using an open-source coding program or language that is publicly accessible and often (but not always) free to use. This effectively means that when a developer creates your robot, he/ she writes the code using one of the top open source RPA frameworks or simply python.

At Capto, for example, we use mostly python to build our customized robots. This means that we don’t engage with a commercial vendor. This helps us keep pricing low, quality and flexibility high, and security fully in control.

What is traditional RPA?

Traditional RPA, on the other hand, is what we refer to when we hear expressions such as licensed RPA and commercial RPA. This type of RPA is indeed based on developer licenses and is proprietary. This means that the developer building your bot doesn’t have access to the underlying source code. Developers are effectively left with a drag-and-drop-like interface, or low-code functionality, to build all required bots.

Differences between open source RPA and traditional RPA

The differences between the two “schools” of RPA are many and all pretty fundamental. To understand them better let’s talk through them one by one:

Development

One of the key differences between open source and traditional RPA is the way the bots are developed. With open source RPA, bots are developed using python or another open source language or framework. This means that the developer has direct access to the source code and can improve it, update it and maintain it directly at all times.

With traditional RPA the developer has no direct access to the underlying code. Instead, he/ she uses a drag and drop interface or low code to build the required bots or workflows. This can make it quite hard for developers to build the exact solution desired by the end-user. This is due to the inherent proprietary systems and the reduced flexibility since developers can only use the set of features made available by the vendor.

Deployment

Open source RPA ensures a very fast, and hands-off deployment. Deployment can be done on your desktop or the cloud depending on the specific requirements. In both cases, however, deployment is done pretty smoothly and with no major bottlenecks.

Traditional RPA historically used to offer only on-premise deployment. This was expensive, taking a long time, and was often associated with extensive maintenance efforts to keep up the on-premise servers. Nowadays, however, most traditional RPA providers offer a cloud deployment as well which is expected to reduce the deployment time and make it far easier to complete successfully.

Infrastructure

With open-source RPA you have full control over the infrastructure. What that means is that you decide where to host your bot, on a desktop, on-premise server, or the cloud. If the cloud option is preferred, you then have full control over which server to use.

Traditional RPA, on the other hand, is inherently associated with a closed costly infrastructure. Here you also have control over where your bots are hosted. However, it’s up to the vendor to choose the server provider. This means you have limited control over the overall cost since this is pushed by the vendor.

Maintenance

With open source RPA maintenance is required following third-party updates. Say your bot connects to Facebook and Facebook makes a big update to its platform. This will potentially require the developer to make adjustments to the bot to make sure it works smoothly with the new version of Facebook.

With traditional RPA, however, maintenance is required not only because of third-party updates but also updates pushed by the vendor. The latter is completely outside of developers’ control. What’s incredibly important to mention here is that the rate of broken bots with traditional RPA has been notoriously high.

The reason for this is mainly due to auto-updates of the vendor systems over which developers have no control. This, coupled with insufficient documentation on the updates, makes the successful maintenance of bots tricky and costly.

Thankfully, this issue is not in scope with open source RPA. This is the case because with most open-source software and languages, python especially, developers have full control over the versions of the frameworks and libraries used in building the bots. Importantly, the version used in creating your robot will not change automatically with future updates, unless your developer decides so.

Features

With open source RPA the features that your robot can have are virtually limitless. Developers have access to the code. As such he/she can be as creative as he/she wishes to achieve ultimate customization.

With closed RPA, the features that developers can use are vendor specified. This means that developers can only use the features included in the vendor’s set of features. This can become limiting both in terms of the functionality of the robots and the creativity that developers can unleash.

Scalability

Going hand in hand with the flexibility and control over infrastructure and features, open source RPA allows for fast scalability. Not only that but it’s also the most cost-efficient option on the market today to scale RPA. More on that in the pricing section below.

Traditional RPA has made a name for itself when it comes to the scalability of RPA. This is mostly driven by traditional vendors being the only trusted option on the market until recent years when open source RPA started to shake things up. Scalability with traditional RPA is still perceived as best achieved with traditional vendors. However, that only applies to businesses that can justify the large investment required.

Resources for developers

When we talk about open source RPA we talk about an active global community of thousands of developers and contributors. The amount of documentation that is available is also impressively extensive and free to access.

In comparison, the resources available for developers using traditional RPA are made available from the relevant vendors. As such, they tend to be limited when compared with open source RPA. This is the reason why often when traditional bots break, it takes quite a bit of time to find and resolve the problem.

Security

With access comes control. With control comes security. Open source RPA ensures robust security since at any point the code can be audited. Also, with access to the underlying source code, developers can see, locate, and fix vulnerabilities in the code as well as any bugs.

Traditional RPA is inherently closed. This means that the code making up your robot is not visible to you or your developer at any point. It is only accessible by the RPA vendor. As such, security is based entirely on trust.

Pricing

Open source is a low-risk low-cost way of getting started with RPA. If you have the development resources on your team, you can build some test robots virtually for free. At Capto we use open source technology and adopt a consumption-based pricing model where the price is determined by the amount of work your bots get through. This means that you are paying for the direct value you receive from your bot 🙂

In comparison, traditional RPA adopts license-based pricing. This means that an annual license is required for each robot you need to be deployed. As such, the upfront investment is pretty high and makes scalability a very pricey undertaking.

Important point to make here is that with open source RPA you can now bring as many robots as you need in solving one problem because you don’t pay per robot but per consumption. This compares with having 1 single licensed bot doing everything on its own. Why having just 1 licensed bot doing all the work? Because with traditional RPA you you pay per robot not job done, and the amount is pretty significant so it’s hard to justify the extra cost.

Company size

Traditionally licensed RPA was created and continues to be used by large organizations that can justify the high cost. We’re talking about large companies with complex processes the automation of which would delivers a high enough ROI to justify the investment into a robot.

With open source RPA the discussion about company size and who can afford RPA becomes irrelevant. That is the case because companies of all sizes can start using RPA virtually for free if they have the development skill in the team. If external help is required, the upfront cost tends to be insignificant or in some cases none which means that every company can afford it and start benefiting.

Conclusion

In summary, these are the main differences between open source and closed traditional RPA. Which type of RPA you go with is inherently a blend between appetite for flexibility, security, cost, and speed. As such, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions as the wider business circumstances and the specific project requirements could weigh the scale in either direction. What we encourage businesses of all sizes to do is consider all options and make decisions based on complete information. Also, if you or anyone of your teams need further information, make sure to consult!

Our team at Capto is here to help with any automation-related questions so feel free to leave us a comment or if you want to speak to us directly, you can book a call with one of our experts. And yes, it’s free and without any strings attached.

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How RPA helps maximize your ERP investment

Marchela / February 1, 2022

We’ll talk about RPA shortly but first. Investopedia defines Enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the process of integrating the important parts of any business. This is made possible with the help of an ERP software system. These same ERP systems appeared by this name in the 1990s and promised to integrate your business planning, inventory, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, and just about anything into one single place. Pretty powerful, right?! Well, we certainly think so.

What is RPA?

Before we move on though, it’s important to clear out what we mean by RPA or robotic process automation. According to our partners and friends at Robocorp, it is a type of business process automation that involves software robots. These robots automate manual, multi-step tasks and processes that typically take a lot of time, and energy to complete. It would have been cool to watch if they did, but sadly you wouldn’t find RPA robots walking around your office, shouting “fire” every time they launch an automation. Instead, they’re lines of code that we implement on our desktops, internal servers, or the cloud to perform tasks for us automatically.

Why would we do that? Well, because we have far more valuable things to do than enter data, classify emails, scrape data from the web. You get the idea.

Link between RPA and ERP

ERP systems have come a long way to the point where Cloud ERP is not even a new development anymore. However, many legacy systems, critical in the business operations, have lacked the modernization of the ERP space. This has slowly resulted in a lot of manual interlinking required to be made between legacy systems and Cloud ERP. Luckily, RPA is here to help!

RPA replicates human actions without the need for any additional software, IT upgrades, or interruptions. What that means is that RPA has an impressive track record of helping companies become more efficient. This is achieved by automating data flow between systems and freeing up people to invest time into more meaningful activities.

This makes ERP automation one of the key processes to automate within your business operations.

How RPA helps you get more out of your ERP investment

How many instances can you point to where your business has invested in a piece of technology or software and paid a significant amount for it. Yet, the adoption of the technology or the utilization of its full capacity has been somewhat disappointing?

Wherever the ERP needs to be integrated with bespoke or legacy systems, the use of its full functionality is limited. This is where the use of RPA becomes very powerful.

Senzcraft have noted that integrating ERP systems with other systems takes months of effort. That’s especially the case if the integration is with customer or supplier systems. RPA helps to accelerate the process through automated communication between systems.

The world is going on the Cloud! And so are you ... despite any legacy systems

When integration between a Cloud ERP and a legacy system is not available, the data transfer is performed manually. In such cases, RPA bots come in with a bang to transform this manual process through automation.

Through successfully implemented RPA businesses achieve greater effectiveness and speed. However, they also get an economical interim solution until a legacy system is upgraded or replaced.

This is particularly important in M&A situations where legacy systems are inherited as part of the merger only to create operational “mayhem” and inefficiency. RPA, and especially open-source RPA, becomes the perfect solution in these scenarios due to its flexibility, affordability, and quick deployment.

You can go "modern" without the cost, hassle, and time usually required

The upgrade or replacement of a dated system causes disruptions. How severe they are depends on the size of the business, the data stored, and the attitude of staff towards change. This is often caused by a significant amount of time and money spent, staff resistance, and short to long-term loss of full operationality.

Often the risk and unpredictable business consequences that may follow a technological revamp incentivise leaders to delay the system modernization until it is absolutely business-critical.

In these circumstances automation robots allow businesses to benefit from the latest digitalization technologies and developments in process automation.

There are already multiple real-life examples of “use cases across diverse functional areas such as order to cash, tax & compliance, logistics that are based on RPA working with client ERP systems. In these cases, value is created through improved automated operations, low cost to scale, and future-ready process design. ROI is often reflected in improved process KPIs in less than 8 weeks”.

It's time to build in a better performance & more flexibility

RPA allows for a significantly improved synchronisation between systems. It ensures faster performance and access to a lot of capabilities that human task performers would take far more time to execute. The scope for error is significantly reduced too.

RPA also brings in an eased access to the benefits of both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), such as image processing, character recognition, and language recognition capabilities. It’s important to note that otherwise, both AI and ML would not be available unless a direct investment is made into the technologies.

RPA essentially mimics the behavior of ERP users, records their actions as they enter data, access applications/ systems/ databases, perform commands and transfer files and data in-between applications. These are only a few examples of how RPA ensures an improved ERP performance and as such, an optimum version of your ERP which is automated, responsive, and more user-friendly.

End-to-end process automation

ERPs are incredibly helpful and the benefits of RPA have been proven time and time again. However, the ultimate focus now is not only on the automation of standalone tasks but the streamlining and automation of entire end-to-end processes. RPA adds speed and accuracy to the business architecture and makes possible the connection between different processes which otherwise may be impossible to link smoothly and effectively.

Just recently at Capto we had a great example where a client had to connect their ERP with their bank’s access portal via an SFTP server. Whilst the process on the bank side and the process on the client site were well defined and streamlined, they were not connected. This meant that a significant amount of time was spent each week by the client’s team to review the information on the bank’s portal and transfer the data into the ERP.

This is a good example where RPA offers end-to-end automation of the entire process which ensures the automated transfer of data between the bank’s portal and the ERP, thus saving a lot of time for manual review and data transfer. This is a strong example of how powerful RPA is in the automation of entire processes as opposed to disconnected tasks and standalone processes.

Ending note

The implementation and increased utilization of ERP and RPA are here to stay. The ultimate business advantage, however, comes in the combination of ERP and RPA. This results in a smoother, faster, and error-free utilization of the ERP of choice. It also ensures access to the latest technological developments and benefits of both AI and ML. It is the proven shortcut to maximizing your ERP investment without the need for additional applications or IT upgrades of any sort.

What’s more is that with open-source RPA there are also no annual robot licenses or high maintenance costs, since the cost is determined based on consumption. This way you only pay for the true value you receive from your hard-working robots 🙂

Better, faster, stronger … cheaper!

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6 Key Processes to Automate within Your Business Operations

Marchela / January 7, 2022

Every business is unique in its offering, niche, supply chain, verticals, and business model. However, what is common between all businesses is that they all have operations. There are processes that need to take place for business to be conducted so customers receive their products and suppliers – their payment, on time and accurately. All of a sudden running a business sounds easy, and so straightforward … if only.

The context we set out below provides interesting insights but if you’re in a rush, dive straight into the processes you should prioritise for automation here.

Business operations and the team that make it all possible have a lot of stakeholders to manage. As such, there are a lot of processes that need to be performed accurately but also time and cost-efficiently for great business results to be achieved for both investors and customers. That’s often the key challenge of COOs and Ops Directors. How to run everything quickly, efficiently, correctly, and still keep customers, employees, and investors happy?

And that’s where business process automation comes in a big way!

What does company automation mean in the Ops world

The last 18 months and specifically the operations disruptions caused by Covid all around the world, were golden proof of the power and need for company automation regardless of location, company size, and industry.

73% of organisations worldwide are using automation technologies – such as robots, machine learning, and natural language processing. This was a response to the pandemic, the accompanying disruptions in demand, supply shortages, and increasing sick leaves and resignations.

McKinsey reports that companies’ digitisation of customer and supply-chain interactions as well as internal operations has accelerated by three to four years solely due to the disruptions caused by Covid. This was in response to new demands and the need to respond rapidly to changing circumstances.

These, according to executives, have accelerated the investment into digital initiatives and in particular company automation. What is fundamentally different in the post-Covid business environment is that a digital transformation is no longer just “nice to have” in order for business operations to be cost-efficient.

Business leaders are now recognising the importance of automation and digitalisation as mission-critical factors to achieving the overall business strategy.

This is why we put together a list of the key operations processes that leaders should prioritise for automation to achieve fastest ROI and save the most resources to invest in more valuable projects. So, let’s dive right into it.

Keys Operations processes to prioritise for company automation

Unquestionably, there are a lot of business processes that will come up in the conversations about where to start with automation. However, at present, the following 6 processes are bound to require the highest investment in terms of time, staff resources, and cost and be characterised by the largest need for manual intervention, high repetitiveness, and predictability of the steps required to complete the process.

1. Document Generation

One of the key challenges that most businesses face daily is the generation of documents, for example client contracts, NDAs, employment, and other legal documents, purchase-order agreements, etc. The process usually requires a few predetermined steps, a series of manual actions, and a lot of concentration on the side of the staff who prepares the documents to make sure all information is transferred across from all key systems into the newly generated document completely and accurately. Clearly, the scope for error and time required are excessive.

However, automation comes in to auto-pull all required information from your companies’ internal systems, databases, and any relevant external sources. A robot designed specifically for the task can generate all documents required. This is done by first selecting the correct template from your company depository, then filling in the correct information, finalising the document, and even sending it for your review via email. Ready for your review and any follow-up adjustments.

Automation quickly transforms a long, dull and costly process into a standard task performed quickly, and efficiently by a robot. And with significantly reduced scope for error and no staff frustration or exhaustion.

2. ERP Automation

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine running a business without an effective Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Used to manage processes such as resource allocation, price changes, demand forecasting, and so on, an ERP system gives a real-time carousel of the key metric critical for the smooth running of your business. However, that’s the case only if the right integrations are made between your ERP system and all the other systems, datasets, and Spreadsheets you use to capture all your company data.

In such cases, automation and the implementation of software robots are becoming increasingly valuable. They quickly ensure that no information is missed out, transferred across incorrectly, or data is delayed even by a single day.

Automating the interconnectivity between your ERP system and your local desktops and external systems ensures that your ”information carousel” is efficient, real-time, accurate, and stress-free at all times whilst improving the quality of your analysis. This is made possible by designing an intelligent robot that automates all data flows going to and out of your ERP system, thus increasing the available insights, and reducing the scope for data omission, delays, or sick days.

To find out even more about ERP automation also check out: How RPA helps maximize your ERP investment

3. Purchase Order processing

Essential to any business is the ability to place purchase orders with the most suited supplier, at the best available price, and with all other required parameters in an efficient way to ensure the supply chain cycle is quick, smooth, and meeting quality standards. Similar to the automation of the Document Generation, the purchase order process can be easily automated to instruct a robot to place all required orders. This is achieved by intelligently taking all order details from a sheet, system, or database and processing dozens of transactions in mere seconds.

What’s important to note here is that a robot can not only do the manual repetitive task spotlessly but it can also use pre-configured artificial intelligence to ”learn” from the previous orders placed. This way it makes educated predictions about which item should be ordered from which supplier and in what quantities depending on the expected demand, for example. This speaks for the fascinating power of automation and the extent to which it can streamline, improve and boost the purchase order process irrespective of the volumes.

4. Demand and Supply planning

This requires an effective real-time gathering, making a lot of computations and analysing of a lot of different data, often stored in different places which make it even harder to execute the process. Performing all these tasks manually requires a significant amount of time, concentration, and exposes the final analysis to error in the calculations, omission, or inaccurate transfer of information.

The use of a software robot becomes very crucial in cases where you have multiple sources of data, complex operations, and volume of data that is otherwise unrealistic to analyse in its entirety by a human. A robot gathers all the information, performs the necessary calculations, and sends you the final results and forecast. This ensures that the only input required by a human is the final decision-making and judgment exercise, thus guaranteeing accurate forecasting and improved quality of the demand and supply planning.

5. Inventory Management

Keeping an accurate representation of your inventory is absolutely paramount for the smooth running of any business, especially within retail, supply chain, and logistics. This is why inventory management has been one of the key processes that businesses prioritise for automation.

In this particular process, software robots can monitor of the inventory, perform key computations and analysis, send notifications when stock levels fluctuate below and above certain levels, place orders automatically when triggers are met, and provide real-time reporting to management. Robots make it accurate, easy, and smooth to track manage the stock levels. They take actions automatically when certain events occur which increase the responsiveness of the business and improve the quality of the overall process as all actions are based on data-driven triggers.

6. Resource allocation & management

One of the key challenges of any business is how to utilise supplies, staff, and available funds in ways that ensure the smooth short-term operation of the business as well as its long-term sustainability and profitability. This is where proper management and smart allocation of resources becomes not only important but essential for the sustainability of the business. This is often contributed to all the disruptions that are frequently associated with the incorrect allocation of materials, budgets, and people to projects and tasks.

Software robots support this entire process by automatically integrating all required data and performing the necessary analysis to ensure resources are allocated strategically. Robots also assist by sending reminders, notifications, and inquiries to all relevant teams as needed and circulating the allocations report to all parties involved, thus saving a lot of manual tasks and back and forth between people and departments. Not only that but they save a significant amount of manual hours which is better invested into analysing and strategising based on the analysis prepared by the robots.

That's all well and good but how to automate all these processes

The short answer here is robotic process automation (RPA) or the design and implementation of intelligent hands-off robots that perform all manual tasks involved in the above processes, and much more! The idea of RPA is that a task or a whole process can be delegated to a digital worker, i.e. robot, that performs within seconds all that is required, with stellar accuracy, without exhaustion and tiredness, and 100% consistently (all dependent on the pre-configuration).

On top of that, however, it’s important to note that we don’t just talk about any RPA technology. We talk specifically about open-source RPA. The reason for that is that so far open-source RPA is the technology that we see time and time again to solve business problems quickest, most flexibly, and sustainably, whilst allowing for complete control over the process and scalability of the automation across departments and processes.

RPA and anything that mentions open-source are concepts that have been around for a long time already but they still carry ambiguity and uncertainty, hence a lot of businesses still fall short to understand and take full advantage of them.

Our team at Capto is here to help you answer any questions you have on RPA, open-source, or process automation more generally. Simply schedule a call with us and get your list of questions ready.

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24 Mission-Critical Processes to Automate within Finance & Accounting

Marchela / December 15, 2021

Automation is quickly shifting its place in companies’ priority lists to become one of the top three strategic developments to focus on in 2022. With that, key processes within finance & accounting continue to distinguish themselves as the most business-critical automation examples to focus on first. This is driven by an impressive record of successful automation developments and a proven fast return on investment.

Main characteristics of processes that are highly automatable

Automation can save your business up to 40% of losses resulting from accounting errors. With so many processes still being highly manual and inefficient, it’s super easy to get excited about automation but hold on a moment. Not every process you’re dealing with is “eligible” for automation. For an automation project to be successful and to achieve a quick and substantial return on investment, the processes involved should have the following characteristics:

highly repeatable
high volume
rules-driven
with low exception rate
with inputs that are electronic or machine readable.

All processes that meet these criteria are highly automatable and should be prioritised for automation.

Keys automation examples to prioritise within finance

Now that we know what processes we should be looking for, let’s look at the keys ones within finance to automate first. There is a vast amount of processes within finance & accounting that are perfect candidates for automation. As such, we will group them into four different function categories. This is namely: accounts payable, accounts receivable, compliance, and month-end reporting.

Automation examples within Accounts Payable

Ensuring effective supplier due diligence and correct and timely payments for all purchases made are two simple-sounding but certainly not easy goals to ensure and track at all times. This is where automation can significantly add value. Both in terms of freeing up time for more investigation and ensuring the company finances do not suffer due to untrustworthy suppliers or payments made to vendors in error. Here are some of the key processes that companies all sizes and industries must automate to ensure the health of their account payable function:

Purchase order processing

Supplier verification and setup

Invoice data extraction

Supplier statement processing

Classification & Reconciliation

Payment processing

Automation examples within Accounts Receivable

One of the main areas of focus within finance is unquestionably the Receivables. All related processes ensure funds are received by the deadlines, and are reflected in the accounting systems correctly. In addition, where receipts are delayed, processes ensure they are flagged, investigated, and resolved timely. This is to ensure no cashflow disruptions, late supplier payments or risk of damaging your client relationships.

To ensure increased productivity of your accounts receivable team, and that the operations are void of human error, the following processes should be prioritised for automation. They have the highest return on investment and ensure that the overall process runs smoothly, error-free and quickly. Also, they are directly linked to a healthy balance sheet and an effective cash collection with are both business-critical.

Automated Generation of Invoices

Billing processes & Automated invoicing

Invoice data extraction

Account reconciliation

Sending of invoices to customers

Customer data management & communication

Customer verification and setup

Automated Payment processing

Automation examples within Compliance

Compliance has notoriously been the business function that often takes the most time, is linked to the highest financial and, potentially, reputational risk for the company. Yet, it is defined by many highly manual, and repetitive processes which means that both the potential and need for automation are fascinating.

One of the most painstaking compliance processes that most large enterprises have to deal with annually is the external audit and all the multi-faceted requirements that come as part of it. Even just within audit, there are many and varied use cases that can reduce the time and cost of an audit significantly. One example is an automated reconciliation between systems the output of which can be shared with auditors for investigation of discrepancies. Another one is auto-populating auditor’s working papers with the information for all samples requested. Of course, these are just a couple of examples in an area so rich with automation opportunities.

However, besides audit, there are many other processes within compliance that meet the criteria for high-automatable processes. Some of them are as follows:

Extraction of data for compliance reports

Auto-reconciliation between systems and accounts

Data aggregation for tax liability

Automated Tax return preparation & auto-filing

Automated conversion of data to tax basis

Completion of tax return workbooks

Automation examples within Month-end Reporting

I doubt any finance team member would disagree that month-end closing procedures can be a time-pressured and highly stressful process to get through. Performed every single month, all processes involved are highly automatable and are proven to save not only a lot of material mistakes for businesses but also risk, time, and stress.

One of the key processes to note here is the generation of the month-end reports. This can be easily automated by automatically extracting all relevant information from all company systems, emails, and other reports, and automatically directing all the information to an Excel sheet or any other relevant working file, ready for the required month-end reports to be generated.

However, it is important to mention a few other important and highly repeatable processes. These can further ease the month-end reporting process and significantly improve its efficiency. Some of these processes are the following:

Automated data extraction from relevant systems

Automated report generation & auto-send for review

Month-end Auto-Reconciliation of the cash accounts

Automated performance of month-end closing calculations

That's all well and good but how to automate all these processes

We’ve been talking about automation for over 10 years now and the reality is that now there are a lot of technologies and solutions out there that can solve all the challenges mentioned above. The only question really is how, to what extent, and for what cost. Here are a few technologies that can help with the automation of your finance & accounting processes:

1. No-code solutions

With the hype of automation over the last few years, in particular, a lot of companies were founded to sell the idea of easy automation for all simple tasks and basic workflows. Such solutions have become very popular in automating simple workflows, such as automated sending of data from one app to another, or e-signing of documents.

These solutions can be super handy and easy to get started with if your tasks are simple and the apps you want to automate between are on the list of these companies’ integrated systems. With this, of course, comes the natural flaw of these solutions in that they quickly become short at solving some challenges. Examples of that is where a custom-built system is involved or the workflow is complex or specific to your business and internal systems.

2. Use Case specific automation solutions

Depending on the use case, there are now a plethora of companies that have specialised in solving a particular use case, again with no coding required on the customer side as well. For example, there are now plenty of options to choose from if you wish to automate your payment processing or your expense management, or your customer communication management. That’s great as these solutions often come with a lot of features and integrations which make them quite advanced in their particular use case.

But can and should a large enterprise have separate software that solves one particular use case at a time? I’ll let you think about it because the answer would vary depending on the company size, complexity, maturity, and internal policies 🙂

3. Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) technologies

A rather powerful and industry and use case agnostic technology that has emerged not so recently actually is what is called ETL, or extract, transform, load software, such as Data IQ and Alteryx, among others. These tools definitely don’t come with the “plug in and go” proposition of most no-code solutions providers mentioned above. As such, good technical know-how is required to get the most out of the power of these technologies. However, once mastered, they have the capabilities to extract and transform data in all required formats, systems, and outputs. Also, across difference use cases and business requirements.

4. Robotic Process Automation

Last but most definitely not least, we have to mention robotic process automation (RPA). However, not just any RPA but open-source RPA as that’s fundamentally different from traditional Gen1 RPA drag & drop solutions. Open-source RPA allows any process and any task to be automated exactly as required without the hefty cost of traditional RPA licenses. This is irrespective of complexity, industry, or inputs and outputs. Open-source nature of RPA allows a fully customizable, flexible, secure and affordable automation of all processes irrespective of complexity, company size or industry.

The opportunities and need for automation are significant and ever more important to prioritise now than ever. With so many processes to prioritise for automation and so many options on the market, we hope this post was helpful. However, if there’s anything you feel we’ve missed out, let us know in the comments and we’ll make sure to incorporate.

24 Mission-Critical Processes to Automate within Finance & Accounting Read More »

Capto introduces NextGen Automation at FinTech & InsurTech London

Marchela / October 20, 2021

Capto was invited to speak at one of the leading FinTech and InsurTech conferences in Europe, happening on 12-14 Oct in London.

The FinTech and InsurTech conference was a hybrid event which brought together leaders from companies from giants like AXA, IBM, Capgemini, and Microsoft, and scale ups and start ups such as OakNorth Bank, Saphyre, Nuggets and Capto. Our co-founders were super thrilled to be invited to speak alongside experts from the FinTech and InsurTech industry and present their take on automation and its key role in the digital transformation of businesses post the pandemic.

Why was this so important

Not only was the event the first of its kind after the breakout of Covid-19 but it was also the first event our co-founders were able to present the next generation of automation tools which come to completely shake up the market. Cloud-based, open source and serverless, NextGen automation technologies make automation accessible, scalable, flexible and affordable for companies across industries, and importantly, across company sizes too. For this event, Capto joined together with our partners at Robocorp who are the creators of the market-leading open source python-based RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platform which Capto heavily relies upon for the automation of an impressive range of manual processes and repetitive tasks. We couldn’t have been more excited for our partnership with Robocorp and the opportunity to present to a larger audience the capabilities of open source RPA and how Robocorp and its cloud-native open source platform fundamentally lowers the barriers to RPA adoption by making it easier, quicker and cheaper to build and deploy software robots that automate manual mission-critical routines. The conference clearly demonstrated the need for open innovation, digital acceleration and financial inclusion, addressed not only by leaders of FinTech and InsurTech businesses like Checkout.com but also executives of legacy organisations such as Bank of England, Societe Generale and AXA.

Replay of the talk is now available

Our co-founders’ 20 min presentation provides an overview of what is meant by NextGen automation, how the next generation of automation technologies facilitates the growth and sustainability of companies in and outside of the Fintech ecosystem, what the impact of the pandemic has been on digital transformation, and what NextGen automation transformers all businesses should be learning more about and start implementing sooner rather than later.

If you have any questions, comments or ideas, please <a “=”” href=”http://calendly.com/capto/robot” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>reach out to our team and we’ll happily help however we can!

Play Video

About Capto

Capto empowers companies and their teams by designing, building and managing bespoke solutions, in order to automate routine tasks and complex manual processes. With our Automation-as-a-Service model, we create automations tailored to your company’s unique processes, team goals, business needs, and appetite for change and investment. Our robust approach to automation allows us to resolve business problems smarter and quicker whilst staying fully focused and committed to adding value and building trust with every single one of our business partners and clients. We believe work should be analytical, efficient, value-adding and purpose-driven and we are here to create the infrastructure to make it happen whilst saving businesses time, risk and cost!

Learn how to start automating today

Capto introduces NextGen Automation at FinTech & InsurTech London Read More »

Your Ultimate Guide to Finance Automation (for CFOs)

Marchela / September 1, 2021

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE GUIDE

Your Ultimate Guide to Finance Automation

The finance function is where 70% of companies start their digital transformation with automation. If you’re only just getting started or are looking to scale your company’s finance automation, this guide will walk you through the most essential points you need to know to start saving your team hours of tedious work.

Learn all of this and more:

Why you should bother with Automation
What processes are highly automatable
What are the quick wins with the highest impact
What are the next steps to automate your finance processes

Just fill in your details to download the guide.

🌏 Country

Your Ultimate Guide to Finance Automation (for CFOs) Read More »

Human errors are a total misconception

Marchela / July 15, 2021

Ok, we’re starting strong with something everyone has said or at least heard in the past few years, in talks about quality control, process and performance reviews, or technology presentations. Human errors became the big red dot to point at whenever people wanted to motivate us to buy the next new thing that was gonna save us from these notorious errors that had to be reduced and eventually eliminated.

We won’t challenge the “errors” part here. Errors do happen but we wanted to get to the bottom of WHY they are happening and how technology is causing and resolving them … And so, we researched and researched and found that the human errors we are all talking about daily are actually a huge misconception in that they are NOT human at all.

They happen naturally and we challenge you to think of them as Natural errors instead and here’s why.

Let’s start quickly and give you a bit of context.. Why do we call it a human error?

Human errors came around for the first time in the 80’ (Swain and Guttmann, 1983) when Witney Houston wanted to “dance with somebody”.

But why the 80’?

Basically, that’s when technology kicked off.

Companies started to invest more and more in digitizing their different processes.

People stopped writing their invoices on papers and started having cashier machines.

Traders stopped calling and started clicking.

Supply chains were no longer done through the post but via email.

And this changed a lot of things around the world.

People were spending more and more time being the bridge between all these new solutions and quickly started to invent new activities like copy-pasting, spreadsheet mesmerising, folder organising and email forwarding.

This created a lot of activities that people are still doing today (around 45% of their time) but, reality is, none of these activities are designed to be done by the human.

With the main goal of increasing efficiency, and quickly, we filled our work lives with more and more sources of information, i.e. different databases and systems, without thinking sufficiently about the information process. That’s how humans became the bridge between well-thought, efficient, safe alternatives to hand-written invoices and manual cash reconciliations.

We had successfully created a wide web of systems which meant people could do more, quicker!

And the more we were able to do, the higher the returns on investment. So we pushed for even more … to the extent that people had even more “bridging” to do between the systems and with that, more and more mistakes because the nature of the work was eye-tiring, unexciting and anything BUT human-like.

So it's the people who are responsible for the human errors, right?

Are we really though? 😲

No! Take a look at your own job, you probably do a lot of things that should be done by robots, and not you … Countless tasks nowadays require no thinking, just a simple execution with standard logic to “get to the second line”. And that’s where talking about human errors is just so out of place. All these errors are generated by a process that isn’t designed for humans … yet we’re STILL stuck at the “bridging” stage.

All these human errors happen naturally because they stem from processes that require NO thinking, innovating, cognitive reasoning and judgement, all of which are the activities tasked to the human …

No human tasks, no human errors .. or at least, you’d think that’s simple logic!

Think about any of the following for a second:

Have you ever transferred lots of names, dates and numbers from a scan into a spreadsheet? Then you probably remember asking a colleague for extra pairs of eyes in the end, just to make sure you haven’t gotten anything wrong?

Have you ever had to repeat a series of keystrokes more than 100 times? We all have, so most likely you also had a moment of realization that you lost your focus for a sec … when you saw a duplicate entry you now had to erase?

When was the last time you had to send a report to your manager? Do you still spend good 10 minutes each time reviewing the template just to make sure you did not miss to correct a spelling mistake?

Well, there are infinite examples of natural errors that we collectively try not to talk about aloud too often because they’re so simple that we don’t want to be associated with them.

I mean, you had typos in your email, COME OOON??! 😫

This is a reality in all companies still today. It costs a lot, yet it’s often not even voiced, faced or even properly estimated because it comes to say that the operations of the business isn’t error free and let’s be honest, we all like to be right!

But let’s voice some of the costs of these natural errors?

Human❤

Think about all the stress and self-doubt that are experienced by the individual who’s been “found guilty” of making these errors. All this not only leads to total lack of enjoyment at work, but can also impact the person’s mental health if the conversations aren’t handled in a constructive positive way.

And if that isn’t bad enough already, with time and frequency, this could also disrupt some otherwise good personal relationships, both within the team and potentially clients …

So there’s A LOT at stake!

Time spent/ wasted

Even if the error is corrected, think about the hours that are being spent, on both drafting and then reviewing the information. And what if you review and spot areas for improvement? You’ll probably return the work to the preparer and review once again later … tick tock!

All this time is probably spent in little increments here and there but if you add them all up, you might be surprised at the amount of time that gets wasted … daily!

What if you could invest all this time into something that actually makes a difference?🤔

Desire to just leave -> Higher Staff turnover

The types of processes that are boring and perfect opportunities for natural errors often raise personal questions.

Am I really here to do this kind of job?

What do I bring to the table?

Why am I stressing about such silly things?

Maybe I should look somewhere else?

And that can be costly to the individual, the HR department and the training team … you can think a long way. You know the soccer players and the whole team need stability to create a truly great team that work.

Think about your players and your team the same way!

Risk Management

Natural errors do happen and if someone knows this, it’s the risk management team. They estimate the financial impact across the organisation and then spend a lot of time trying to reduce the compliance risk. Where are we most exposed to and how badly can it get?

Reputation, both personal and company

We often hear on the news and social media about errors that this and this company made back in 2010. Well, natural errors have the nasty habit of causing a lot of bad publicity if unspotted at the right time and the reputation cost could be pretty bad. Talk to BP or more recently Peloton …

But what about the individual? Think of someone who’d like to be “remembered” for the typos and the lack of attention to detail … You can’t think of anyone because no one would ever like to have such reputation follow him/ her.

Clearly, financial

If the error remains unspotted and is sent to your client or to the client of your client, its cost is direct and can end up being very expensive.

But you are right ... It’s easy to point to the problem

So what about the solutions?

Well, luckily the technologies have caught up so quickly that today they not only bring the systems but also the solutions that do the “bridging” so you no longer have to.

Next time you find yourself doing something dull that doesn’t require you to think, innovate, reason cognitively or make a judgement, read a bit about the possibilities of technology today and speak up because

You shouldn’t be competing with software and robots to do THEIR job.

You’ve got innovative, creative, judgement work to do instead so stay focused on that.

In the next blogs we’ll talk about the different technologies that are already solving your daily frustrations but just as a little teaser to kick start your day, these can broadly be grouped for ease into the following “families”:

Optical Character Recognition

Think about the errors you make or see your associates make (daily) when copying information over from a scan into a spreadsheet, system, etc. OCR reads all sorts of files (including scans) and transfers the data into a spreadsheet or a system automatically.

Extract Transform & Load

Extracting a report, updating its values within another report, and loading it into a different system. Wrong file, duplicates… Yep, that’s where ETL software comes to avoid these errors.

Robotic Process Automation

Navigating through your internal system every day and constantly checking if you did not forget anything? This is where the robot’s job begins by taking over all the manual tasks that are standard, predictable and follow a simple logic … thinking about all the clicking and scrolling you do daily.

So what to remember?

Errors do happen and those that we call human are often wrongly attributed to the human.

So we call all the simple typo-like errors that we make daily NATURAL instead because they result from tasks that aren’t designed for performance by the humans … simple!

These errors can be avoided and the technologies already available today go a long long way at delegating them back to the robots.

So if you have a task that frustrates you as you go about your workday today (or any day), feel empowered to speak up about it.

Chances are that people around you (yes, including your manager) haven’t read this post and aren’t as aware as you are now that technology can and should step in!

We’d love to know about the tasks that drive you a bit crazy as well so please send us a message on Linkedin and share with us.

Thank you for reading this first blog!

If you learned one thing from it, we’d love to know about it so please let us know 🙂

Have a great day and week ahead!🙌

Human errors are a total misconception Read More »

Marchela

Help us help where automation can speed access to aid

What is open source RPA?

What is traditional RPA?

Differences between open source RPA and traditional RPA

Development

Deployment

Infrastructure

Maintenance

Features

Scalability

Resources for developers

Security

Pricing

Company size

Conclusion

What is RPA?

Link between RPA and ERP

How RPA helps you get more out of your ERP investment

The world is going on the Cloud! And so are you ... despite any legacy systems

You can go "modern" without the cost, hassle, and time usually required

It's time to build in a better performance & more flexibility

End-to-end process automation

Ending note

What does company automation mean in the Ops world

Keys Operations processes to prioritise for company automation

1. Document Generation

2. ERP Automation

3. Purchase Order processing

4. Demand and Supply planning

5. Inventory Management

6. Resource allocation & management

That's all well and good but how to automate all these processes

Main characteristics of processes that are highly automatable

Keys automation examples to prioritise within finance

Automation examples within Accounts Payable

Automation examples within Accounts Receivable

Automation examples within Compliance

Automation examples within Month-end Reporting

That's all well and good but how to automate all these processes

1. No-code solutions

2. Use Case specific automation solutions

3. Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) technologies

4. Robotic Process Automation

Capto was invited to speak at one of the leading FinTech and InsurTech conferences in Europe, happening on 12-14 Oct in London.

Why was this so important

Replay of the talk is now available

About Capto

Learn how to start automating today

Your Ultimate Guide to Finance Automation

Thank you!

Let’s start quickly and give you a bit of context.. Why do we call it a human error?

So it's the people who are responsible for the human errors, right?

Human❤

Time spent/ wasted

Desire to just leave -> Higher Staff turnover

Risk Management

Reputation, both personal and company

Clearly, financial

But you are right ... It’s easy to point to the problem

So what about the solutions?

Optical Character Recognition

Extract Transform & Load

Robotic Process Automation

So what to remember?