Keywords

information technology integration, manual data entry, spreadsheet-based processes, workflow automation

Abstract

Modern information technology (IT) has greatly expanded the capability of companies to coordinate activities and process large numbers of transactions. Unfortunately, large companies often support thousands of individual applications, and the data necessary for financial reporting is scattered across these applications. As applications and data proliferate, companies must link together the applications and systems, often using spreadsheets and expending significant amounts of time in manual data entry and manipulation. This manual work is slow, expensive, and error prone and lacks useful business insights. Also, the employees who must perform these tasks are often overwhelmed and unsatisfied with the mundane work.

Until recently, there have been no great alternatives outside of expensive new systems or patched- together spreadsheets to deal with the issue of connecting data across the organisation. However, in the early 2000s, several technologies were combined including character recognition (artificial intelligence), screen scraping, and workflow automation, and by 2003, commercial products were being released to automate human– computer interactions (Mullakara, 2019). Robotic process automation (RPA) technology, as it was called by software pioneers (Mullakara, 2019), permits the automation of many human interactions with a computer, including aggregating and entering data. RPA has nothing to do with a physical robot, in spite of its name. Rather, the name connotes eliminating the ‘robotic’ parts of a process that a human does and replacing them with easily implemented, computerised procedures.

Original Publication Citation

Harrast, S. A., and D. A. Wood. 2022. The status of robotic process automation. In E. Strauss and M. Quinn, M. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Accounting Information Systems (2nd ed. Vol pp 269-284). London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003132943.