Summary
Learn how to enhance your preliminary analytical review procedures.
How does this add value to your audit?
Visualize changes in the financials
Analyzing multiple periods allows you to visualize trends of balances, flows of transactions, and key ratios over time. If 5 years of client data is available, “expected ranges” will also be available for key ratios on the visualizations, whereby actual results outside of these ranges are exposed for investigation.
By grounding the preliminary analytical procedures in a broader assessment of trends in the business and relevant key performance indicators (i.e., ratios), the result is a more operationally relevant assessment of what’s changed in the financials.
Risk scoring
By risk scoring and stratifying all transactions in the general ledger by High, Medium, and Low risk on the Risk Overview dashboard, you can see transaction risk broken down over time, as well as risk at the account level.
These high-value graphs allow you to flag certain accounts (and their transactions, via an easy drill-down feature) to focus on, and consider risk as another “data point” together with year-over-year trends.
Quick high-level understanding
Using the data table to interrogate the detail of certain accounts and “scan” the transactions, you’re able to better understand an explanation provided by the client or get a sense of what types of transactions are contributing to a certain observed high-level variance or an increased account-level risk score from previous years.
Use case example
MindBridge AI empowers the user to easily move away from a preliminary analytical review grounded in basic questions like "why did a certain balance change from last year" by helping you to visualize patterns and identify trends.
Risk Overview tab
On the Risk Overview tab, the risk by account graph allows you to flag certain accounts with high risk scores and effectively consider transactional risk as another data point together with simple year-over-year delta imbalances.
Looking at the graph in this example, the consulting fees and professional fees account jump out as being relatively high risk accounts. Clicking on the account will will enable you to drill through to the Data Table and view the corresponding transactions for further investigation.
On the Data Table tab, there are three transactions that can be clicked on and expanded to reveal more details about the entries making up these transactions. Selecting a transaction or entry and scrolling to the bottom of the page will reveal which control points were triggered. Clicking the icon will reveal more information as to why the control point was triggered as well as other transactions that have triggered this control point.
Trends tab
On the Trends tab, analysis over multiple periods allows you to visualize trends of balances flows of transactions as well as key ratios over time. Any spikes or dips that seem out of pace with historical results can be easily spotted and be the basis for further enquiry.
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