2011-02-01
The importance of the audit function is only likely to increase in the current climate – but budgets will come under pressure as businesses reduce costs.
DataConsulting can help you meet this challenge by reducing your audit costs whilst increasing your audit comfort.
We are experts in the design and implementation of Computer Assisted Audit Techniques (CAATs) and have significant experience in running CAATs across retail, manufacturing, financial services and public sectors.
CAATs are computer scripts that substantively test 100% of a data population and give increased audit comfort over sampling – reducing audit risk. And, because they are repeatable and automated, they can be more efficient than conventional audit procedures – reducing costs.
For a business, they can uncover process inefficiencies that would not normally be identified by business process reviews.
We have a suite of CAATs across all key business cycles – purchase to pay, revenue and receivables, stock, fixed assets and payroll – which can be easily tailored to client systems, and mapped to audit assertions. We are experienced in extracting the required data from all major ERP systems, including SAP and Oracle.
Example CAATs include: searching for unrecorded liabilities (GRNI), after-date cash testing, balances exceeding credit limits, stock valuation re-calculations, and payroll analytics.
Our CAATs can support specific audits on an ‘as-required’ basis, or can help drive the audit plan by identifying higher risk areas of the business.
