Last Wednesday it was Seminar Robotic Accounting at the EXPO in Hoevelaken. Where you will tell everything there is to know about Robotic Accounting, UBL and other developments concerning robotization of accounting. During the seminar, KPMG, Keurmerk Zeker online, Visma and Exactly explained what the current developments mean for them and what future important developments are. Marco Freriksen of Smartbooqing and Eva Verbaan of Crowe Horwath Foederer talked about how robotic accounting works in practice.
Future of Robotic Accounting
Robotic accounting is a component within RPA or: Robotic Process Automation. RPA is about administrative business processes in which actions by human labor are replaced by automation. During the presentation of KPMG it became clear that the accountancy market has already mastered the basics quite well, but that there is a lot of uncertainty about the differences between the concepts of automation and robotisation.
The future of robotic accounting lies in the best possible robotisation of cognitive properties, or the interpretation of a document as an accountant would do. One of the techniques that will become important for this is NLP: Natural Language Processing. Exactly what Smartbooqing is doing.
Robotic Accounting in practice
During the seminar Eva Verbaan of Crowe Horwath Foederer told about the experiences with Smartbooqing. Eva underlined the innovative character of Foederer and his desire to distinguish himself time and again as a true cloud accountant.
High recognition, user-friendliness and productivity were the most important parameters for choosing Smartbooqing as their standard for invoice recognition. It is precisely the invoice processing at line level that provides an enormous step in performance. Applying automated invoice processing at line level makes it possible to process invoices within and across accounts uniformly and consistently. As a result, time, energy and money are saved in the preparation of the annual accounts.
What about now?
That there is still a lot to learn about robotic accounting. What exactly it is and what different suppliers mean by this term is quite different. One thing is certain: robotisation will play an increasingly important role in accountancy.