Developing Analytics for Audit – What are the Challenges?

With advancements in technology, more and more data is being made available to be shared between applications and more data is now easily available to auditors. With the improvements in cloud technology and the internet, we are moving to cloud enabled applications where it is now quite easy for different cloud applications to exchange information with each other, and even populate databases.

Auditors are increasingly expected to utilise this access to raw, or source, data and make it an integral part of the audit.

If we designed an Analytics product for auditors to use, what would need to be included?

Our development journey began by questioning our audit customers and industry contacts about the current use of analytics within the industry. Our findings were somewhat surprising:

• Most auditors have only a hazy definition of what analytics would be within an audit, and how it could be used
• Not many auditors had great access to source data in useable (ie. able to be easily imported into other programs/databases) formats, with labels
• Very few auditors are skilled in using analytics tools, or creating suitable tests – even in basic worksheet programs.

Not surprisingly, the top five identified concerns around analytics within the audit sphere include:

• Acquiring data
• Fraud analytics
• Transaction analytics
• Staff skills
• Cost

Could you & your staff take on the use of Analytics in your Audit practice? Take our quiz!

It’s an exciting time in the Audit and Accounting fields with all the new technologies coming into viable and useable products. Are you and your staff poised to be able to take advantage of these advances and be ahead of your field? Take this quiz to find out.

www.caseware.com.au

We’ve come a long way in developing our CaseWare Cloud Analytics product from a concept to an (almost) actual product, which will be released in Australia in November 2017. In our first version, we don’t have a complete answer for all of the identified concerns, but we do have a viable and immediately applicable product to assist with auditing and providing valuable insights for your clients. And, we have a big long list of potential improvements and inclusions for our V2.0, 3.0 and beyond.

 

Andreas Ong, Technical Manager | CaseWare Australia & New Zealand