Our client has a compact audit team that works with a comprehensive, detailed and highly involving audit plan every financial year. Their annual audit work plan has more than 80 specific tests covering sections such as procurement, accounts payable, treasury, inventory and manufacturing. Due to the significant amount of work involved in performing regular audit duties, the auditors faced a challenge of finding the time required to design, build and run analytic tests on Arbutus to aid them in their auditing work. We were contracted to convert the analytic tests in their audit plan as Smart Apps in Arbutus Analyzer.

Using Arbutus Analyzer and Python, we built Smart Apps that perform the data analysis required for each audit area. Arbutus Smart Apps are procedures and routines that execute an analytic task against specified data for a specified period.

SmartApps differ from continuous monitoring scripts in that they can be run on demand, and use graphical dialogues that allow the user to customize how the audit data is to be analyzed by making changes on the time period, data, thresholds, materiality and other variations.

We received the organizations audit plan and having already configured access to their SAP ERP application, we scripted and deployed procedures that perform a specified audit test. The Smart Apps were also designed to allow the user to specify how they would like the results shared with them. (Via excel reports on email or as a data file on Analyzer.)

Each Smart App performs analysis of 100% of the data (no sampling of data) on each audit area and may return multiple results files based on the audit plan requirements.

Some of the audit areas covered include : 3-way matching on invoices, supplier credit terms, changes in master data, procurement planning etc.