When we talk about emerging technologies in accounting and finance, there’s the list of usual suspects: artificial intelligence, blockchain, drones, Internet of Things, virtual/augmented reality, XBRL and, perhaps, 3D printing. One topic may or may not be in your list of the top 10 tech developments, but has been hit hard and often in our world: Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

I wrote about RPA back in September and October. I have now dug deeper; I recently had the opportunity to develop and teach a course on RPA and other emerging accounting, audit and tax technologies for Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The class was made up of senior accounting majors, with no programming background. Although there are a number of RPA vendors, this class focused on UiPath and the different versions of their Studio product: StudioX, Studio and Studio Pro.

As with most major trends in information technology, there is disagreement on the scope and boundaries of what is RPA and what bleeds over into other areas. There is some general agreement that RPA is a way to automate a series of repetitive and routine tasks that a person, such as a financial professional, performs on a regular basis to free up that professional for more value-added work. By teaching the computer the steps that a person would do on their own – running programs, clicking on web sites, copying and pasting data from the Web to Excel, creating a standardized Word document or PowerPoint with the results – the tasks can be performed more quickly, with less manual error and with less monotony for the person performing the task.

Although most of the major vendors in the space – companies with names like UiPath, as already mentioned, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and Microsoft with its newly renamed Power Automate – have been around for 15 years or more, RPA has really been touted as an important solution for financial professionals for fewer than five years. CPA Canada, for example, introduced it to its members in 2019.1

With few exceptions – StudioX being one of them – these solutions require at least rudimentary programming skills, as per the old adage, “Ease of Use is usually associated with Hard of Setup.” In other words, things are easy to use only because someone spent a long time thinking through and honing the solution for the end user.

To a great extent, that’s what happened with StudioX. As I mentioned, UiPath has a product “Suite” that in many ways is akin to what I’ve learned about Teslas (the car). Do you want a car that can drive 425 km? That costs X. Do you want to go 570 km? That costs X+$10000, but the difference is just a software switch. StudioX and Studio are the same software package. Studio exposes more functionality and costs more. StudioX doesn’t have the same functionality, but what it shares has been carefully evaluated and a friendlier front end put on it.

What StudioX does is facilitate business people who are not programmers in documenting the steps they take when working with Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, the Web, email, SAP and other applications; creating new documents, pulling information from different sources, copying, pasting, saving, sending. If Excel can do it, StudioX can do it; it is highly focused on working with Excel and uses Excel for much of its easy-to-use functionality.

Over my next few postings, I will go more into what I have learned about RPA, as especially facilitated by StudioX:
• How RPA can be used to automate repetitive. monotonous and detail-heavy activities.
• How programming and StudioX compare, contrast and interrelate.
• How add-ins to StudioX make it a very powerful personal hub for doing many different tasks.
• How AI and RPA overlap and complement each other.
1 https://www.cpacanada.ca/-/media/site/operational/rg-research-guidance-and-support/docs/02310-rg-rpa-tech-spotlight-nov-2019.pdf?la=en&hash=67BF08B0DB5F3A5D8AED0E19FC7D0B75AFC94DDC.