Training CourseDuration 5 Days – 35 hrs.

 

Overview

This course provides automation professionals with a practical understanding of the complete business-to-business financial process lifecycle—from customer and vendor onboarding through purchasing, invoicing, payments, collections, reconciliation, financial reporting, and period-end closing.

 

The program explains how financial transactions move across departments, documents, controls, and enterprise systems. Participants will identify repetitive and rule-based activities suitable for robotic process automation, workflow automation, intelligent document processing, process mining, analytics, and AI-assisted automation.

 

The course is platform-neutral and may be adapted to commonly used ERP, finance, banking, procurement, and automation platforms. Practical exercises focus on process mapping, control assessment, automation opportunity identification, exception handling, and designing an end-to-end financial automation solution.

 

Objectives

• Explain the end-to-end financial B2B transaction lifecycle.
• Understand the roles of Finance, Accounting, Procurement, Sales, Treasury, Operations, and other stakeholders.
• Describe the key documents, data, approvals, and accounting entries used in B2B transactions.
• Understand the Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Record-to-Report, and Treasury processes.
• Map financial processes using standard process-mapping techniques.
• Identify manual, repetitive, rule-based, and high-volume financial activities.
• Evaluate whether a process is suitable for automation.
• Recognize financial risks, internal controls, segregation-of-duties requirements, and audit considerations.
• Design automation workflows with appropriate validation and approval controls.
• Develop exception-handling, escalation, and human-in-the-loop procedures.
• Define automation requirements and relevant performance indicators.
• Prepare a high-level business case and automation roadmap for financial processes.

 

Target Audience 

• RPA developers and automation engineers
• Business process automation professionals
• Business analysts and systems analysts
• Process analysts and process improvement specialists
• Finance transformation professionals
• Intelligent automation consultants
• ERP and financial systems professionals
• Shared-services and business-process-outsourcing personnel
• Finance and accounting professionals involved in automation
• Internal control and compliance personnel
• Project managers and product owners managing finance automation projects
• Data analysts supporting financial operations
• Solution architects and technical leads

 

Prerequisites 

• Basic knowledge of business processes and workflow concepts
• General familiarity with accounting or financial transactions
• Basic understanding of automation, RPA, or information systems
• Experience using spreadsheets, ERP applications, or business software
• Programming knowledge is helpful but not required. Participants without an accounting background may attend because the necessary financial concepts will be introduced during the course.

 

Course Outline

 

Day 1 – B2B Finance Fundamentals and Process Architecture

Module 1: Introduction to Financial B2B Processes 

• Definition and characteristics of B2B transactions
• Differences between B2B and business-to-consumer financial processes
• Overview of the end-to-end B2B financial lifecycle
• Major participants in a B2B transaction
• Roles of Finance, Sales, Procurement, Treasury, Operations, and Accounting
• Shared-services and outsourced operating models
• Common ERP and financial-system environments

 

Module 2: Financial Documents and Transaction Data 

• Purchase requisitions and purchase orders
• Contracts and service agreements
• Delivery receipts and receiving reports
• Sales orders and customer orders
• Supplier and customer invoices
• Credit notes and debit notes
• Statements of account
• Payment instructions and remittance advice
• Bank statements and reconciliation files
• Master data and transactional data
• Introduction to accounting entries and the general ledger

 

Module 3: End-to-End Process Mapping 

• Introduction to process discovery
• Defining process boundaries and stakeholders
• Current-state and future-state process maps
• Swimlane diagrams and responsibility mapping
• Identifying systems, documents, decisions, and handoffs
• Happy paths, exception paths, and escalation paths
• Identifying bottlenecks and control gaps

Workshop:  Map a sample end-to-end B2B transaction from purchase or customer order through settlement and financial reporting.

 

Day 2 – Procure-to-Pay and Accounts Payable Automation

Module 4: Procure-to-Pay Process 

• Procurement planning and sourcing
• Supplier selection and onboarding
• Vendor master-data management
• Purchase requisition creation
• Approval workflows
• Purchase-order creation and issuance
• Goods or services receipt
• Invoice receipt and registration
• Two-way and three-way matching
• Invoice approval
• Payment scheduling and execution
• Accounting entries and reporting

 

Module 5: Accounts Payable Processes 

• Invoice capture and classification
• Data extraction from structured and unstructured invoices
• Duplicate-invoice detection
• Tax and withholding validation
• Purchase-order and non-purchase-order invoices
• Employee and supplier expense processing
• Credit-note and debit-note processing
• Payment runs and remittance advice
• Supplier statement reconciliation
• Accounts payable aging

 

Module 6: Procure-to-Pay Automation Opportunities 

• Supplier onboarding workflow automation
• Purchase-requisition and approval automation
• Intelligent invoice processing
• Automated invoice matching
• Duplicate and anomaly detection
• Payment proposal preparation
• Vendor inquiry automation
• Supplier reconciliation
• Handling incomplete or mismatched transactions
• Controls against duplicate, unauthorized, or fraudulent payments

Workshop:  Assess a Procure-to-Pay process and identify automation opportunities, risks, controls, and exceptions.

 

Day 3 – Order-to-Cash and Accounts Receivable Automation

Module 7: Order-to-Cash Process 

• Customer onboarding and master-data setup
• Customer due diligence and credit assessment
• Quotation, contract, and sales-order processing
• Pricing and discount validation
• Order approval and fulfilment
• Delivery confirmation
• Billing and invoice generation
• Invoice delivery and acknowledgment
• Payment receipt and cash application
• Collections and dispute management
• Revenue and receivables reporting

 

Module 8: Accounts Receivable and Collections 

• Customer account maintenance
• Credit limits and payment terms
• Accounts receivable aging
• Customer statement generation
• Collection prioritization
• Payment reminders and follow-ups
• Promise-to-pay monitoring
• Short payments, overpayments, and unidentified payments
• Credit-note and refund processing
• Dispute and deduction management
• Bad-debt monitoring and escalation

 

Module 9: Order-to-Cash Automation Opportunities 

• Customer onboarding automation
• Automated credit checks and approval routing
• Sales-order validation and entry
• Invoice generation and distribution
• Automated cash application
• Bank-reference and remittance matching
• Collection reminders and customer communications
• Dispute-case creation and routing
• Receivables-risk analytics
• AI-assisted collection prioritization

Workshop:  Design an automated Order-to-Cash workflow, including cash application, collection, and dispute-handling rules.

 

Day 4 – Record-to-Report, Treasury, Reconciliation, and Controls

Module 10: Record-to-Report Process 

• Financial transaction recording
• Journal-entry preparation and posting
• Subledger and general-ledger integration
• Accruals, prepayments, and provisions
• Intercompany accounting
• Fixed-asset accounting
• Trial-balance preparation
• Period-end closing
• Financial consolidation
• Management and statutory reporting

 

Module 11: Treasury and Cash Management 

• Cash-position monitoring
• Bank-account administration
• Payment processing and authorization
• Bank-statement retrieval
• Bank reconciliation
• Liquidity and cash-flow forecasting
• Foreign-currency transactions
• Intercompany settlements
• Payment-file controls
• Fraud prevention and transaction monitoring

 

Module 12: Financial Reconciliation Automation 

• Bank-to-ledger reconciliation
• Subledger-to-general-ledger reconciliation
• Supplier and customer reconciliation
• Intercompany reconciliation
• Rule-based transaction matching
• Tolerance rules and materiality thresholds
• Unmatched-item management
• Exception aging and escalation
• Reconciliation certification and audit trail

 

Module 13: Financial Risks and Internal Controls 

• Financial accuracy, completeness, validity, and authorization
• Segregation of duties
• Maker-checker and approval controls
• Access and identity controls
• Master-data controls
• Fraud and duplicate-payment risks
• Audit trails and evidence retention
• Regulatory, tax, privacy, and record-retention considerations
• Business continuity and automation failure procedures

Workshop:  Develop a control matrix for an automated financial process, including risks, preventive controls, detective controls, and system evidence.

 

Day 5 – Automation Analysis, Solution Design, and Roadmap

Module 14: Automation Technologies for Finance 

• Robotic process automation
• Business process and workflow automation
• Intelligent document processing
• Optical character recognition
• Application programming interfaces
• Process mining and task mining
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Generative AI applications in finance
• Analytics and financial dashboards
• ERP-native automation capabilities

 

Module 15: Automation Suitability Assessment 

• Transaction volume and frequency
• Process stability and standardization
• Rule-based versus judgment-based activities
• Data availability and quality
• Application and system accessibility
• Exception rate and process variation
• Financial and operational risks
• Expected benefits and implementation complexity
• Selecting attended, unattended, or human-in-the-loop automation
• Prioritization scoring model

 

Module 16: Financial Automation Solution Design 

• Requirements discovery and stakeholder interviews
• Business requirements and functional requirements
• Process design documents
• Business rules and decision tables
• Input, output, and data-field definitions
• System and application interaction points
• Validation and approval requirements
• Credential and access management
• Exception handling and escalation
• Logging, monitoring, and audit evidence
• Testing and acceptance criteria

 

Module 17: Testing, Deployment, and Governance 

• Unit and functional testing
• System-integration testing
• User-acceptance testing
• Financial control validation
• Negative and exception-path testing
• Production deployment and release management
• Operational monitoring
• Incident and change management
• Automation governance and ownership
• Automation maintenance and continuous improvement

 

Module 18: Business Case and Automation Roadmap 

• Establishing the process baseline
• Calculating effort and processing cost
• Full-time-equivalent capacity savings
• Cycle-time and error-rate improvement
• Compliance and control benefits
• Return on investment and payback period
• Automation pipeline prioritization
• Phased implementation roadmap
• Key performance and risk indicators

 

Capstone Workshop 

Participants prepare and present a high-level financial automation proposal covering:

• Selected financial process
• Current-state process map
• Process problems and automation opportunities
• Proposed future-state workflow
• Systems and data requirements
• Business rules and controls
• Exception-handling procedures
• Expected benefits and performance indicators
• High-level implementation roadmap