Expenditure Auditing

introduction

A Nairobi based security company needed a business intelligence to support a company wide drive with the following objectives :

Save on cost expenditures

Improve process efficiency

Increase employee productivity

the challenge

Lack of direct access to some of the database by system design, hence heavy reliance on manually prepared reports and “Noisy” data (erroneous entries, lots of reversals) & manually maintained spreadsheet data made it difficult to get a definitive figure for many expense lines. The company also needed expressions developed that would give a clearer indication of how efficient their employee shifts and rosters were.

Solution

Tribase Labs started by understanding the business systems and data structures. We then created a data repository by consolidating all relevant data from key business systems that was spread across diverse sources. This included spreadsheets, relational databases, PDF documents and other data sources.

We then used the newly created data repository to perform various analytical tests – both exploratory and standardized. The clients requirements here were :

Give definitive amounts for the various expense lines e.g. bank charges, administrative expenses and other employee cost overheads
Find outlier transactions or procedures that would require further investigation.
Establish the most efficient shifts and roster schedules for their employees.

Results

A major restructuring of the employee shifts and rosters lead to a dramatic decrease in the employee payroll overheads as demonstrated below. This was accomplished by changing company policy regarding spare shift employees and the length of the employee shifts.

Other cost overheads which were previously ‘hidden’ lead to company cost reduction efforts leading to lower expense overheads. In some instances, the company was able to renegotiate better rates from financial providers based on the total charges paid out.

Overall, the company gained a much clearer and better oversight of their transactions and processes. The management could make better decisions based on regularly updated data analysis and projections.