Prototyping and Implementing Robotic Process Automation in Accounting Firms: Benefits, Challenges, and Opportunities to Audit Automation

•We present four practical business process scenarios and the proposed RPA solutions.•Instead of furthering theoretical contributions, we offer practical analysis to avoid the potential RPA implementation pitfalls.•Our study could also provide accounting educators with realistic anecdotes to use in the classrooms.•We offer six practical implications which we have drawn from RPA challenges.•Looking forward, auditors must prepare for a pivot toward automation, algorithms, and analytics. Despite the advancements in technology, auditors still spend a significant amount of time performing repetitive and rule-based tasks. Our paper examines various audit scenarios within four accounting firms and discusses the potential for robotic process automation (RPA) to improve the efficiency and accuracy of these tasks. We propose and implement RPA-enabled solutions to make various procedures more efficient and effective. These anecdotes were based on our consultancy experiences with auditors from a group of Big 4 and mid-sized accounting firms. We present four practical business process scenarios and the prototyped RPA solutions. In each scenario, we explain our automation strategies and the duration of development. We also describe the implementation benefits and challenges, as well as analyze how we have helped the accounting firms automate their real-world audit tasks by providing the as-is and to-be Business Process Model and Notation that one can extend for future RPA development. Finally, we discuss the future challenges and opportunities regarding the broader implementation of RPA in accounting and audit tasks.