Payplus wanted, firstly, to see if the Furlough process could be even partially automated to reduce the tens of hours required every month during lockdown for key personnel whilst ensuring quality, accuracy and compliance at all stages. Payplus also then wanted to understand if a very repetitive, manual and time-consuming invoicing process could be improved, and reduce the 10+ working days it took to complete manually.

If these two outcomes could be successful, Payplus would feel confident that a great deal more activities could benefit from robotic process automation, which in turn would bring benefits for their clients and employees alike.

So the Furlough Bot Pilot was the agreed starting point – Priority, Importance, Impact! Luckily, Lawrence & Wedlock had already developed a reusable almost “off-the-shelf” solution that already worked and needed only minimum configuration for Payplus to use. So the teams connected and collaborated to gather the necessary HMRC account and client information and confirm the process to be followed. Thirty minutes later, this was done and the Payplus Furlough Bot was ready to start work. The first few transactions were run, then checked, and double- checked…and it had worked, with 100% accuracy, 99% faster and an emailed a status outcome report. And it was ready for more.

Sadly for key staff at Payplus, each employee record claim had been painstakingly and manually entered into the HMRC portal, and also required careful checking and validation to ensure errors and mistakes were corrected, which can easily happen with hundreds of manual records to enter.

The first step in the process is to navigate to the HMRC furlough claim site URL and log in using the correct agent and company credentials. RPA is incredibly secure when it comes to log-ins and passwords, and doesn’t require any sensitive or private information to be revealed.

The next step was to enter company specific information followed by the individual employee claim information, one-by-one (where claiming for less than 100 employees). This was finished by adding more company and payment information and confirming the data entered was correct before finally submitting. The robot was also programmed to capture a success or failure outcome result, notify key personnel accordingly for exception handling and then move on to the next company to process their claim. And the process would be repeated daily as more and more Furlough claim requests came in.

The long, manual invoicing process was next, which had the potential to reduce manual work so significantly. The laborious process involved extracting and reading data from multiple systems, importing into spreadsheets, and then manually adding, filtering, manipulating, updating and validating against other sources before arriving at a final monthly invoicing file, roughly 12 days later. This was all managed by a sole employee, so the invoices could finally be sent to clients forpayment.

Bots For That are continuing to support Payplus to discover and evaluate other process activities which are suitable for automation and to explore how the future of work could shape new growth plans, exponentially improve business processes and free experienced staff to better service clients.

One area of the business already identified with huge potential is to utilise Bots to bridge the unfilled gaps between internal systems like Xero and from those systems to external sources like HMRC and The Pensions Regulator.