North Central London ICB strengthens financial reconciliation with automation

North Central London (NCL) Integrated Care Board worked with UiPath and NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) to automate financial reconciliation and invoice processing, reducing manual effort by 95% and improving reporting consistency across finance teams.

Having this in place means we’re better prepared to deal with increased volumes without putting more strain on the team.

Sarah Rothenberg • Deputy Director Finance Business Partnering, NHS North Central London

Reducing duplication across finance teams

Finance teams across NCL were manually reconciling ledger extracts against year-to-date reports and updating central reconciliation files for budget monitoring.

With eight teams carrying out the same process separately, the work created duplication, inconsistencies, and a growing administrative burden. Staff were spending significant time on repetitive reconciliation and invoice-review activities rather than higher-value finance work.

Finance staff were additionally required to manually review and extract key information from each invoice PDF, taking around two minutes per invoice. With over 25,000 invoice PDFs to process, this created a substantial and ongoing manual workload.

As transaction volumes increased and the organization prepared for its merger with North West London ICB in April 2026 to become NHS West and North London, now the largest ICB in England, NCL needed a more scalable and consistent approach.

Creating a single source of financial truth

Using the UiPath Platform(TM) for business orchestration and automation, NCL automated daily reconciliation processes and introduced intelligent invoice processing to simplify financial reporting activities.

The automation reconciles financial reports automatically, flags discrepancies for review, and supports month-end adjustments while maintaining a standardized master reconciliation file as a single source of financial truth.

Using UiPath IXP (Intelligent Xtraction & Processing), the solution also extracts and categorizes key financial data from invoice PDFs, removing the need for manual review. The automation incorporates department-specific logic to support different reporting requirements across teams while maintaining a consistent overall process.

The first automation went live in July 2025, with the second phase delivered in March 2026.

Taking this from an idea to live delivery, the NHS SBS team have adapted with us. The automation now handles the repetitive work so skilled finance colleagues can focus on what matters.

Lyndsey Abercromby • PMO, Finance Digital Transformation, NHS North Central London

Improving finance efficiency at scale

The automation supports the processing of more than 150,000 invoices annually, freeing approximately 5,000 hours of finance capacity that staff can now redirect to higher-value work.

Running overnight in preparation for the next working day, the solution improves the consistency and reliability of financial reporting by creating a single, trusted source of data and reducing duplication across departments.

The solution provides a scalable foundation for the organization's future operating model, supporting increased volumes and further automation opportunities.