Employee Provident Fund Process Automation

The finance team of the client company need to generate an EPF challan containing the details of the employees and the amount to be credited to each employees EFP account. The finance team found it challenging to create the xml file for each location containing the details of the employees and the amount to be credited to their EPF account. This repetitive job is consuming considerable amount of finance team’s bandwidth every month.

Results / Outcomes

Increased efficiency and accuracy due to the modified process for collecting employee data in the existing HR platform rather than using worksheets and emails.

Eliminated multipoint data collection through mails and enforced collecting the required data during onboarding process.
The new process eliminates the times taken for data collection activity from new joiners which took almost a week to complete.

90% reduction in effort of finance team for performing the entire task.

The e payment challan generation process which consumes around 12 hours of an employee is reduces to 20 minutes of software bot execution.

The entire EPF process which took almost 2 week every month is reduces to half an hour activity for the dedicated software bot.

The software bot can be scheduled to execute in non office hours where the EPF portal performance is better.

Employee Provident Fund Payment Challan Generation – The Solution

Challenges:

The employee data for around 500 employees in two locations are maintained in work sheets which needs to be tabulated every month.

Change in format of the employee name in different identity proofs make the tabulation difficult.

Employees data was collected from employees through email which was error prone.

Creating the ECR upload form in the format supported by the EPFO portal was tedious since it will reject the upload form if it contains unsupported characters like ‘.’.

The EPFO portal is not responsive during office hours and the finance team need to wait till midnight for the portal to be responsive.

Gadgeon implemented a two stage solution for solving the challenges.

Modify the current process of data collection and storage for EPF process which rely on work sheets and emails. By exploring the full potential of the existing HR platform, we identified that the the data can be extracted from the HR platform itself through the apis supported.

Implement an RPA based software bot to perform the activities to collect data from HR platform, perform the calculation, create the ECR upload file and generate the challan.

The Solution

Created a software bot using UI path which performs the following tasks performed by finance team.

Collecting location wise employee data from the HR database.

The HP platform provides Api interface to collect data from it. The bot will collect the data from the HR platform through Api.

Create / update UAN for new joiners.

Using the UI interfacing activities of UI path , the data collected from the HR platform is entered into the EPFO portal to generate UAN number for new joiners who doesn’t have UAN number and update the company details for new joiners who already have UAN number.

Create the ECR file in the defined format.

Filled the ECR file fields from the data retrieved from the HR portal and made the calculations based on joining date, number of days present e.c.t
Validated the ECR file generated for conformance which EPFO challan requirements using UI path data validation activity..

Upload the ECR file in the EPF portal and generate the challan.

Using the UI interfacing activities of UI path , the ECR file generated is uploaded to the EPFO portal and generated the challan.

Email notification to the finance team to make the payment.

Utilized the email activity of UI path to intimate the HR and Finance team the details of challan generated.
Email notification will be triggered if there is any discrepancy in the data available in HR platform or any error occurred in the process.

The Solution – Flow Diagram