20/10/2025
RPA for Accountants and Administrators
For years, accountants, bookkeepers and administrators have encountered the same issues when it comes to automating their processes. Existing software (among customers) is often outdated and the number of packages is fragmented. RPA is an affordable, efficient solution for this.
Proliferation of accounting packages
In recent years, more accounting packages have only been added, from new providers, but also new (online) versions of existing providers. As a result, the work for administrators and accountants has not become easier. To administer your customers, more and more packages need to know their way around or even more investments need to be made in new links to get them into central reporting systems. Often, these links are also not available.
The problem with these links is that they are often expensive and inflexible. In addition, the lead time to implement them is long. It is therefore often not worthwhile for a few administrations to make this link, so more repetitive work has to be done by hand. As a result, there is less time left to engage in value-adding activities for the customer.
New approach to automation
A lot is already being automated and many accounting packages also have their own options that can automate parts of processes within the package. However, there are often still steps before or after that fall outside this. This includes sending findings or asking for feedback. Also, these automations often cannot make use of existing links. For a long time, there was no good alternative, but that is now changing with the rise of RPA.
“RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation, and has a completely different approach to automation. Instead of connecting databases to get data from systems, RPA mimics user behavior. This is quick to set up and can be applied to almost any system,” explains Sam van der Wagen, co-founder of VionA. “It is also quick to implement, and can do much more than just retrieve and write data. For example, you can also send emails to request information from customers/suppliers or send them updates.”
The biggest advantages of working with RPA are that the processes run quickly and error-free, whenever you want, and at roughly half the price a person does it for. It also improves happiness at work. Because it's the boring, repetitive tasks that are ideal for automation. This leaves more time for the challenging tasks.
Case studies in accountancy/bookkeeping
An example of a robot that saves a lot of time checks all managed administrations every day to see if important invoices have been received. If these exceed a certain threshold, the responsible administrator will receive an email with a direct link to the invoice. Previously, hundreds of administrations had to be reviewed regularly by hand. In addition, 80% of these administrations did not require any action. A waste of time!
There are many more examples, such as a robot that creates reports with information from various sources and prepares them in an online portal for customers, adds payslips from a remuneration package to the accounts and checks the amounts, checks accounts or the VAT return has been filed, etc.
Deploying RPA
RPA is increasingly being used in accounting firms and administrative firms. Here you can choose to purchase software yourself and hire someone with knowledge of it to build and maintain the robots. A new, interesting alternative is to purchase automations as a service, where the robots run in the cloud (cloud RPA). Here, the entire process, from assessing which processes are suitable, recording them, building the robot and maintaining it, is offered as a service for a fixed amount per month. This can easily be compared to the savings it provides.
