Reducing T-Account Fatigue: An Accounting Proof of Concept

by Korbinian Lutz, Accounting ’23  

In Accounting, copying and pasting journal entries into the corresponding T-accounts can be very tedious work. It’s a necessary step, but, unfortunately, it’s not very exciting. The process takes up valuable time that could be better spent on a more important task. It requires a lot of clicking across excel worksheets and just a single mistake can cause a lot of headaches down the road. This is exactly the kind of problem RPA can fix.  

NICE automation had all the tools I needed to automate a process that I’d usually have to do myself. First, I’d specify the range in which the journal entries were located, including the account name, debit, and credit column. Then the automation would scan through the journal entries row by row. It would identify the account name and whether it was debited or credited. Then it would find the corresponding T-account and post the value in the correct column. It would repeat this process until there were no more journal entries left.  

As sample data, I used 40 rows of journal entries I had from a previous class. It took me roughly 20 minutes to get all the journal entries into the T-accounts when I did it by myself. A task like this can slow you down, fatigue you, and create mistakes. The automation completed the same job in under three minutes with no mistakes. This example perfectly demonstrates the purpose and power that RPA can have.