Save valuable time with Robotic Process Automation in Dynamics 365 Finance

‘Robots are taking over the world’ though unlike The Terminator franchise or H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds no one has been hurt in the writing of this blog! And, there is a happy ending.

Robotic intervention has been long predicted and anticipated by many to make a considerable positive contribution to our lives, whether that is domestically or in our work environment. Within the workplace, over the last decade (probably longer), many businesses have replaced manual ‘mundane’ processes with robotic participation to improve efficiency, productivity and reduce costs. In this blog John Boam, Pre-sales solution consultant at DXC.technology Microsoft Applications Division talks about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) supporting businesspeople and processes in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance (ERP) and the benefits. We are also hosting a webinar on September 2nd to demonstrate RPA with Dynamics 365 Finance, register here.

Situation

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) seems to be the three-letter acronym of the moment, but having had a sensible upbringing in accountancy, I had, until recently, struggled to muster the imagination to think of a practical application for RPA in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

RPA is the application of software to automate a repeatable process, previously carried out manually, by using a ‘bot’.  Automating a process brings benefits such as speed and accuracy, whilst freeing up employees to add value to their organisation rather than being data processors.  Also, in relation to Dynamics 365, automating a process means you do not need to develop the solution to improve efficiencies.  Rather, you can use Microsoft’s Power Platform to create the RPA, thereby moving the “development” outside of the core solution, keeping Dynamics 365 as standard as possible.

The opportunity to do some imaginative thinking for myself came about recently in a conversation with a prospect.  They have a specific issue with managing their sales invoices which is summarized below.

• The business has around 350,000 customers and generates over 8 million invoices per annum.
• They offer some of their customers prompt payment discounts (PPDs) to encourage them to pay before their due date.
• Some of those customers take the PPDs but pay late. Current estimate for these invoices is 2% of the total, which results in thousands per year (estimate).

HMRC’s guidance for dealing with late prompt payments discounts is as follows:

“Where a supplier receives a payment that falls short of the full price, but which is not made in accordance with the PPD terms it cannot be treated as a PPD. The supplier must account for VAT on the full amount as stated on the invoice. If the amount not paid remains uncollected it will become a bad debt in the normal way.”

Therefore, in non-HMRC speak, the business must account for and pay the full VAT amount to HMRC based on the full price (not the PPD price).  However, if the underpaid element remains unpaid by the customer for six months after the payment was received, the VAT relating to the unpaid amount can be reclaimed from HMRC.

Obviously, if the business does not manage this process carefully, they could fall foul of the HMRC rules. They could also be missing out on reducing their VAT liability, effectively paying more tax than they need to.

The standard functionality in Dynamics 365 can manage the process for recovering the VAT relating to the underpayment as follows:

• Post the receipt against the invoice. This will leave the PPD amount as outstanding.
• The VAT liability will be reported in full to HMRC in the period that the invoice was raised.
• After six months of the original receipt, a user can write-off the residual balance on the invoice.
• The VAT liability will be adjusted in the period that the write-off journal has been posted.

Microsoft has provided a straightforward process to handle this situation, however it has some limitations:

• The Finance team need a mechanism to remind them to write-off the residual balance for specific invoices six months after they have been receipted.
• The Finance team will also need to ignore the residual balances on those invoices from Aged Debt reports, Customer Statements and Reminder Letters, because they know that they will never collect those balances.
• But perhaps the biggest disadvantage of all is that the Finance team will need to write-off the residual balances on thousands of invoices every year!

The Solution

RPA seems like an ideal solution for this problem.  We have a manual process which uses standard Dynamics functionality and we just need to automate it, to avoid human error, reduce repetitive tasks and speed up the process!

Here are the outline steps I followed to automate this process using RPA.

1. Create a UI flow in Power Automate

UI flows have recently been added to Power Automate to provide functionality to automate tasks in both Windows and Web applications.  One of its main advantages is that it provides a no-code way of recording a process.  In some ways it is like using macros in Word or Excel, in that the UI flow records your mouse clicks, field selections and data entry.  Once you have recorded your process, you can replay the recording to make sure you have captured everything; and, edit the recording if necessary.

To start recording the write-off process, log into Power Automate, select UI flows from the My flows menu and then click New.

You can then log into Dynamics 365 and start to record the process of writing off an invoice.

2. Embed the UI flow process in a Power Automate flow

Once you are happy that the UI flow process successfully writes-off the invoice, the UI flow can be embedded in a Power Automate flow.

In the following Power Automate flow, the process is triggered manually, but this could just as easily be scheduled to run out-of-hours e.g. at 9pm each evening or over the weekend.

Once triggered, the flow accesses a spreadsheet which contains the invoices that need to be written off.  This is a pretty crude way of controlling the process; and, in a live environment something more secure, such as a database hosted in Azure, would be preferable.

Here is an extract of the data held in the spreadsheet,

Moving on, the flow scrolls through the lines of the spreadsheet and if the “Processed in D365” field is set to N, then the other columns in the row will be passed to the UI flow as the required parameters to perform the write-off.

Although I have already commented that using a spreadsheet is a fairly crude way of controlling the process, this Power Automate was configured to look at a spreadsheet in Microsoft Teams.  This does have a couple of advantages. First, it is a great way to give visibility to a group of users regarding the write-off process; and, second, they can control the invoices that are written-off by adding data to the spreadsheet, subject to granting them the rights to update the document.

3. Test out the RPA

The easiest way to test the RPA is to run the flow in Power Automate.

There are two modes for running RPAs – unattended and attended.  Unattended mode is where the UI flow logs into a device, runs the process, reports progress to Power Automate and then logs out of the device when the process is complete.  Attended mode is where the UI flow runs the process on a device that a user has already logged on to.  It is the latter mode that is useful to verify that the RPA is working as expected.

Below is a recording of the RPA running in attended mode.

Conclusion

This blog has picked one example of how RPA can automate processes in a Finance department.  There are undoubtedly many other processes in your own organisations that would be suitable for automation, freeing up your employees’ time to focus on adding real value to your business.

Another benefit of using RPA is with regards to “keeping it standard”.  A lot of customers that we talk to acknowledge that keeping a system as near to standard as possible is what they want.  They may currently be using a system which they have customised and bear the scars after going through the process of applying an upgrade.  Even worse, they may not be able to upgrade because their customisations will stop working and nobody in the organisation knows how to unpick what was done.

However, once a business starts implementing a new system, the need to develop to meet a specific functional requirement takes priority over the need to keep the system standard.  With RPA you can have both bespoke functionality and a standard ERP system, because you effectively move the development into Power Automate.

How DXC can help

To learn more about automating processes and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) you might like to join our webinar on September 2nd Using the Power Platform and RPA with Dynamics 365 Finance or download our recent webinar via our on-demand section on the website, here is a quick link.

Alternatively, if you would like to get in touch to find out more please email us via busappsuki@dxc.com to arrange a discovery call with one of our RPA solution experts.

Author: John Boam, DXC.technology Microsoft Applications Pre-sales solution consultant

The post Save valuable time with Robotic Process Automation in Dynamics 365 Finance appeared first on eBECS.