How analytics can empower greater audit efficiency and accuracy
How do audit teams accomplish more with less resources?
As the demands on auditors increase in scope and velocity, audit teams need to work faster while maintaining full oversight of the business. Fortunately, automation offers a powerful solution to help audit teams streamline time-consuming and repetitive processes.
From data analysis to monitoring to reporting, robotics can empower audit teams to get more done in less time, and without adding new headcount. Consider the advantages you'll gain from analytics technology and the options available for your team.
How Robotics Streamline and Improve Audit Operations
By automating routine monitoring and data processing across the business, audit teams can gain several key advantages, including:
- Enhanced risk intelligence: Robotics provide in-depth data with minimal manual input, giving organizations more comprehensive intelligence on key risks across all levels of the business.
- Optimized efficiency: Automating repetitive processes such as data extraction and normalization allows audit to get critical analytics in a fraction of the time it takes to manually complete tasks.
- Improved data quality: Robotics decrease manual work and reduce the risk of human error, helping to improve overall data quality and accuracy.
- Cost and labor savings: As organizations look to increase cost-efficiency amid economic uncertainty, robotics cut down on operational time and team capacity needed for audits. In many cases, businesses may be able to rely on analytics robots in place of hiring a full-time data analytics employee.
- Seamless monitoring: Automation allows audit teams to go beyond getting a snapshot into operations within a short window of time. Instead, it enables round-the-clock oversight across the business and can automatically alert decision-makers if an anomaly is identified.
What Capabilities Can Robotics Provide?
Audit teams can truly do more with less when they leverage automation for monitoring, reporting and predictive analytics.
Here are some of the functions your organization can manage through automation, without needing to hire or train a dedicated data analytics headcount.
Access Controls Analytics
With access controls analytics, organizations can maintain privileged access protocols while monitoring digital and physical access. Robotics can handle requirements such as identifying active users who are no longer employed, identifying all accounts with privileged access and flagging unusual systems activities.
Sanctioned Screening Analytics
As a key part of the third-party management process, these automations can compare customer datasets to an excluded or sanctioned list. Key capabilities include fuzzy name matching, National Provider Identifier (NPI) matching, and address matching between the master dataset and sanctioned or excluded lists.
Revenue Assurance Analytics
Automation of revenue assurance processes helps monitor customer and sales order datasets. Capabilities include identifying customer duplicates, flagging irregular customer records and identifying irregularities or missing information in sales orders.
Accounts Payable Cost Containment Analytics
This area of the business is particularly vulnerable to human or system error as well as fraud or control weakness. Accounts payable analytics can flag invoice duplicates, detect missing information, identify costs that exceed approval levels and pinpoint other errors or abnormalities.
Travel and Entertainment Fraud Analytics
Monitoring for travel and entertainment (T&E) fraud with automation can enable organizations to quickly identify and report on irregular activities. T&E analytics offer capabilities such as identifying expenses that exceed expected medians, flagging personal expenses and monitoring for high-risk keywords.
Run More Operations With ACL Analytics – Without Adding Headcount
Ready to leverage robotics to make auditing and reporting more efficient?
ACL Analytics from Diligent offers features designed exclusively for governance professionals. Advanced data analysis, automated workflows and seamless reporting capabilities make day-to-day requirements easier and faster while increasing overall team capacity.
It can be difficult to train a current employee, or bring on a new employee, to expand your analytics program, and both of those options require time and resources that today's audit teams may not have. Our extensive list of analytics services makes implementing the analytics your organization needs quick and easy.
ACL Analytics offers analytics across these five key categories:
- Access controls analytics
- Sanctioned screening analytics
- Revenue assurance analytics
- Accounts payable cost containment analytics
- Travel & entertainment fraud analytics
Diligent offers these customizable analytics at a flat fee, so you can choose the best options for your unique auditing requirements. Learn more about Diligent's scalable ACL Analytics today.
