Hi, I’m Pratul and am working as an Assistant Vice President in Business Reporting and Governance group. My day-to-day responsibilities are related to Financial Reporting and Analysis, setting up Business Performance Metrics and framework, deploying digital reporting assets, automation and establishing data and reporting governance. I have been working in MIS and Data Reporting space for more than a decade for multiple high-performing clients in the F&A domain. With data science skills, I think I will be able to give better insight and recommend high-impact solutions to optimise business revenues and help clients to make informed decisions based on data rather than intuition or guesswork.
There is a treasury team in every company that is responsible to make timely payments to vendors and keep a track of overall cash flow. While making these payments to vendors they witness a lot of duplicate or incorrect payments. These erroneous payments are mostly due to manual typo errors while updating the amount in the payment system or due to the absence of any system checks for duplicate entries for the same vendor which ends up getting duplicate payments. Once the duplicate payment is detected post facto. It is a tedious task to set up strategies for a recovery which is a time-consuming task and overall it also creates mistrust and a bad reputation for a company in the market. This problem of duplicate and incorrect payments creates a lot of confusion, mistrust and a bad reputation for the organisation, the risk of losing revenue and also company incur a huge cost in recovering the lost amount.
To counter the issues faced, I used Feature Extraction through PCA – to select the most critical feature for a duplicate or an incorrect payment, SQL – to store the historical last three years’ payment data and match it with the current payment-ready file to identify potential duplicate and RPA – Extract the dataset from ERP and store in a specific folder to run the operations. A controlled approval feature was added in the payment proposal for an automated payment run. I selected the tools and techniques were selected considering the problem at hand. Some of the key considerations were:
PCA – There are a lot of factors which can trigger duplicate or incorrect payments, Hence it is always preferred to zero down on the most critical factors.
SQL – Considering the problem, we need some references to compare the current payment with some source which can guarantee that a specific payment with a specific combination had been made earlier, we need to host a huge dataset and SQL has the capability to host and fetch the required information.
RPA – UI path to extract the required dataset and store it in SQL folders.
Power Automate – To repeat this exercise on a daily basis.
This tool is very handy and useful in identifying potential duplicates for Treasury Team and Clients and gives a trigger in advance before the actual payment is executed. We saved ~ $1 – 1.5B for the whole year for any medium to large enterprise depending on the size of the business and vendor base. Run this exercise through a mini bot using Power Automate before any payment cycle daily to eliminate the chances of making duplicate or incorrect payments.
The exercise gave me a lot of exposure to the business problem and client satisfaction and which in turn gives lots of endorsements from the leadership for growth within the organization.
