Bots in Finance: Boost Back-Office Efficiency with Automation

The mention of the office of the future could evoke images of machines taking on repetitive, labor-intensive tasks. But that future is now. The development of technologies such as cloud-based applications, software platforms, and enterprise resource planning systems that help companies achieve maximum operational efficiency has made automated offices a reality.

According to the consulting firm McKinsey, corporate financial services have reduced costs by almost 30 percent over the past decade by implementing automation solutions in areas such as purchasing, accounting and payroll. These innovations have changed financial functions and eliminated many inefficiencies.

As a financial analyst and software developer, I took full advantage of automation by setting up bots for financial tasks when I started and founded my own consulting company Pylink. However, many financial bureaus have still not done this, so they continue to devote a lot of time and resources to performing basic tasks.

How My Company Uses Robots for Finance: Simple and Efficient Payments

Let me show you how useful custom automation can be by showing you an example from my company that can serve as a matter study. Although I am a small business, my team at Pylink and I are faced with a significant complexity that comes with payment challenges, including the following:

We are working on several projects based on hourly contracts and we need to keep track of the time of each of our tasks.

Our customers come from different countries and therefore pay us in different currencies.

While we use an internal software engineering team for some projects, we outsource others to developers in different countries.

From the point of view of tax optimization, we have three companies: one based in the UK, one based in the EU and one based in the EU.

Each of our companies has separate bank accounts in different currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP and HUF.

We have regular expenses-such as taxes, salaries and benefits for full-time employees, office space and consumables, as well as software-in various currencies.

What You Can Do With Automation

Now, let’s look at some of the most practical applications of automation and use the tools that I have already talked about. For reference, I will add some examples of coding as a resource for your internal, contractual, or freelance developers- or for yourself if you want to learn Python to support the work of your company or client.

Monitoring of working hours and projects

At the end of each month, the bot (using Everhour) performs the function “close_the_month”, which collects all the hours spent on various tasks:

• My hours on my consulting projects (sales)
• Developer hours for customer projects (sales and costs)
• Developer hours for our own software development (costs)

The following is a simple function that returns a pandas data frame, that is, a table with rows and columns, including all times and projects for a certain period of time for a specific user. Please note that, as already mentioned, this and all the following coding snippets are just highlights of the entire codebase, and not a step-by-step guide to creating our bot.