3E Accounting - a Robotics Accounting Firm

3E Accounting – a Robotics Accounting Firm

With many industries welcoming digital innovation with open arms, the accounting industry being an old age profession is finding it hard to accept it. By adopting technologies like robotics accounting, automation, machine learning, it will change the way accounting professionals work and their role changes accordingly too. To make full use of technologies to improve business operations, the accounting industry needs to shift their mindset and embrace technological growth.

Back in 2019, 3E Accounting founder Lawrence Chai formed the firm’s Digital Research and Development (DR&D) team to lead development in new technological growth areas like robotics process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI). Being the pioneering robotics accounting firm, 3E Accounting has utilized automation to improve productivity and efficiency.

 

Why Invest in Robotics?

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation using software robots or AI workers. With the increasing need to collect, transform and use big data, human workers can no longer handle the rising demand. This is where RPA comes in, not only does the investment in robotics deal with the increasing need for data, but it also benefits the business overall.

Using RPA, a business can save up to 80% on cost and time taken to perform the tasks. Furthermore, using automation, human errors are eliminated and there is consistent quality output, improving the overall efficiency of the business. RPA can replace human workers in repetitive and routine tasks like data entry, leaving the human workers to handle the higher-level work.

By focusing on the higher-level tasks that require humans’ professional judgement and reducing the need to perform manual tasks, human workers feel more meaningful to be able to take on more responsibility with a smaller workload. When employees get job satisfaction, this translates to better productivity for the business. Not only does the investment in robotics benefits the firm itself, but it is also about providing better quality and efficient service for their clients.

 

3E Accounting’s Digital Journey

Following the expansion of 3E Accounting and the growth of technology, the firm has invested ample time and effort in refining the technologies used. As part of the firm’s digital journey, a digital master plan was developed by 3E Accounting’s DR&D team to map out the business’s digital transformation, laying out the fundamental challenges, future industry plans and charted an action plan. Within 15 months, the team successfully completed the digital transformation of 3E Accounting, all services offered can be fully processed digitally, the firm is even able to virtually launch the Hong Kong office during the Covid-19 pandemic.

3E Accounting aims to build intelligent robots to perform tasks and work with human co-workers to improve productivity and enhanced value creation for both 3E Accounting’s internal and external stakeholders, with that in mind, 3E Accounting has been researching and proactively developing on robotics accounting. 3E Accounting has successfully developed two robots, namely the Financial Report Robot and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) robot and is currently in the process of developing the Tax Robot and Bookkeeping Robot, with Tax robot officially launching in 2021 and Bookkeeping Robot targeted to launch in 2022.

The deployment of robots has saved 3E Accounting’s professionals a lot of time for other value-added tasks. The staffs are no longer required to perform repetitive routine based tasks, instead, the staffs are trained to monitor and analyze the results produced with automation. For example, the Financial Report robot is programmed to pick up data in different formats and analyze, learn and verify the data to generate financial statements in accordance with the Singapore Financial Reporting Standards (SFRS) presentation and disclosure. With this technology, 3E’s accountants are able to focus more on value creation activities such as analyzing the financial statements and data generated by the robots to discover ways for clients to improve their business, after eliminating the need to generate financial statements.

With manpower savings on the tasks that can be replaced by automation, there is a 90% reduction of time spent on tasks and an expected 99% increase in 3E Accounting’s productivity. Not only does the implementation of automation benefits 3E Accounting, but 3E Accounting’s clients are also supplied with better quality service too.

3E Accounting - a Robotics Accounting Firm

 

The New Technology- Intelligent Automation

With technology growing into areas yet to be explored, Intelligent Automation (IA) is one to look out for. IA is a combination of artificial intelligence and automation. More advanced than RPA, IA learns and adapts from automation, exploring ways to enhance human’s performance and ability to value add. IA has helped companies become more efficient and provides better quality service and similar to technological enablers like automation, IA replaces humans in manual tasks to allow them to focus on other value-added tasks.

IA can be incorporated into business seamlessly as the processes can remain as it is to work with IA. IA acts like a human, following the process as it is taught. The whole process of using IA is simple but can bring about many benefits. Firms should start adopting technological enablers to remain competitive and IA is one to not miss out on.

With a strong belief that automation will transform the business landscape, 3E Accounting invested over $2 million in researching and developing automation robotics and IT infrastructure. By making great investments in technology, 3E Accounting is able to continue exploring new technological areas like IA to provide greater services for the clients.