Client profile
A UK investment and wealth management group with UiPath Automation Cloud already in production for investment platform data aggregation and portfolio rebalancing, delivered by us in an earlier phase. Unattended robots, Orchestrator, Automation Hub and Power BI dashboards were all in place.
The challenge
Finance audit and year-end reconciliation was still manual: spreadsheets, email chains and fragmented data sources. Analysts pulled records from Sage by hand (10 to 12 hours a week each), matched receipts and invoices line by line, chased approvals through email and meetings, and compiled audit-ready documentation under tight deadlines. Every discrepancy needed manual investigation. Leadership had no real-time view of audit progress or bottlenecks. The pressure peaked at year-end, with extended hours, inconsistent documentation and a real retention risk in the finance team.
What we did
We extended the platform the client already owned rather than sell them another one. No additional licensing was required. The build introduced four UiPath capabilities:
- Document Understanding for receipts, invoices, remittance advice and financial documents, using pre-built models for billing, purchase orders and financial statements to accelerate deployment, with automatic retraining from data validated in Action Center.
- AI Center machine learning skills to flag outliers, duplicates and potential fraud patterns in transaction data, trained on historical audit data.
- Action Center approvals so finance staff review low-confidence extractions, validate vendor name variations and invoice discrepancies, and approve reconciliations inside the workflow instead of over email. Unresolved anomalies escalate automatically.
- Insights dashboards tracking time saved, error rates, audit readiness and cycle-time forecasts, with alerts for threshold breaches, building on the existing Power BI reporting.
Pre-built audit reconciliation templates from UiPath's financial services library accelerated delivery. The program ran over eight weeks: two weeks of discovery and design mapping Sage and the audit workflows, four weeks of build and test, two weeks of user acceptance and go-live. The design is horizontally scalable to monthly close, claims processing, regulatory reporting and treasury.
What we delivered
- Automated extraction and validation of receipts, invoices and supporting documents
- AI Center anomaly and duplicate detection on transaction data
- Action Center approval and exception workflows keeping finance in control
- Real-time audit KPI dashboards in UiPath Insights for finance leadership
- Reuse of the existing Automation Cloud tenant, robots and orchestration with no new licenses
- A pattern extendable to other finance processes
Results
- Manual effort on audit and reconciliation reduced by up to 80 percent
- Analyst data extraction time cut from around 12 hours a week to under 2
- Audit preparation reduced from around 3 weeks a year to under 1
- Total annual benefit of around £150,000 across time saved, error reduction, faster decision-making and strategic enablement
- Payback in around 7.5 months, with year one savings exceeding delivery cost
- No additional licensing: delivered entirely on the platform the client already owned