Following on the success achieved by the development of the standard extract of financial data from SAP, I decided to design and develop a standard extract from PeopleSoft – our company used SAP for finances and PeopleSoft for HR and another package for Pay (don’t ask why). For HR data, we really only needed three files to address most of the audit requirements: Person – providing information on the employee…
Imagine my excitement when I had 7 responses to my previous post on Payroll and then my utter disappointment when I found out that all we in Russian and had nothing to do with the content of my blog. This continued for several days and suddenly switched to English posts about Credit Unions. In total I had over 65 spam bot posts including two that wanted to help me monetarize…
Accessing different systems, trying to address auditor requirements, and performing complex analysis – they all present risks. And while I have had a great deal of success, there also have been many mistakes. I once heard it said, “learn from others mistakes – you don’t have enough time to make them all yourself” or something similar. This is why I always try to post a lesson-learned and this post is…
It was hard to believe, but I had now been at this (data analytics to support audit) for 20 years. And I still found it interesting, challenging, frustrating, rewarding and aggravating – all at once. I was constantly being asked to access new systems and perform analysis for different types of audits. At the same time, I had my regular monthly routine tasks of extracting, downloading and cleansing data we…
People, even those that perform analytics, often think that data analysis can only be applied to financial-type audits. I have tried to highlight other types of audits where analytics played a significant role including transportation, inventory, and hazardous materials (environmental). In that vein, I offer you analysis that was part of an HR recruitment audit. he organization was an international/national police force. Like many police forces, it needed a fairly…
Disaster! After 10 years of hard work to develop a decent understanding of the company’s finance, inventory, two HR and three pay systems, we switched to SAP (for finance and payroll) and PeopleSoft for HR) and another ERP system for inventory. It was bad enough that we were changing systems, but to implement separate systems for the major functions seemed idiotic and created much more work for me and the…
Even now, I firmly believe that the potential for the Y2K disaster was real. The only reason that its effects were minimized was a result of the hundreds of thousands of hours spent checking and rechecking programming code to address the “00” year problem before it occurred. For those of you too young to remember, prior to the year 2000, many databases and applications only used two digits for the…
Analysis had proven to be successful in not only supporting the conduct phase of internal auditors but also during the planning phase. More and more we were being asked by audit teams to perform analytics to support the development of the audit scope and objectives. However, there were still team leaders that avoided the use of analytics. “Analytics won’t be of any use in this audit” was still a familiar…
The analytics team was now at three people – so I could build some overlap in our knowledge of the application systems that were we accessing on a regular basis. For example, this meant that I was no longer the only person who understood the financial system. Now we had at least two people for each of the 10-12 systems we were accessing on a regular basis. For all but…
Analytics in audit attracts people from a variety of backgrounds and I am no different in that regard. I started my career as a games room supervisor at the Boys and Girls Club and worked my way up to a guidance counsellor position. I was mainly working with disadvantaged children (and some juvenile delinquents) ages 6 –17. While the work was rewarding, the pay was not. I was working about…