
Recap key audit analytics and forensic concepts, including data integrity and chain-of-custody practices. Preview hands-on Excel techniques for importing, analyzing, and forming an audit opinion in the next module.
Explore how to import data into Microsoft Excel for audit analytics. Learn about file formats and practical steps to integrate diverse sources and analyze revenue leakage scenarios.
Install Tally on your desktop, set up the system in administrator mode, select educational license and services options, locate the data folder, and import the daily data file into Excel.
Conclude with practical steps for importing data from ODBC sources, web servers, and media files into Excel to support audit and forensic data analysis.
Gain skills in data gleaning, cleaning, formatting, and validating after importing data into MS Excel for audit and forensic analysis, using practical Excel techniques to enhance accuracy.
Learn how to convert numbers that are formatted as text into true numbers in Excel by multiplying by 1, validate results, and fill blank cells to ensure accurate totals.
Explore connecting Excel pivot tables to external text or csv data to analyze millions of rows without importing into a single worksheet.
Modify a pivot table from an external data source by adding a field and updating the data source in the Microsoft query screen to analyze customers by state and products.
Explore why standard deviations cannot be compared across different items and how the coefficient of variation—standard deviation divided by the mean—gives a relative measure of variation.
Examine Benford's observation on the distribution of leading digits in naturally occurring numbers, illustrated by log books and account balances to reveal audit implications.
Explore how a fair coin tossed 200 times implies a run of six consecutive heads or tails, illustrating overwhelming probability and the trust but verify mindset in forensic data analysis.
Explore audit areas where Benford's law applies, what to conclude when data deviate, and a bank case study using leftmost digits to reveal root causes and next steps.
Explore Bedford's law as a cosmic law that holds across time and space. Apply it in audits to test whether data are naturally occurring and reliable.
Explore Benford's law and its logarithmic rationale, revealing why numbers often start with 1 more than 9 and how auditors apply this pattern to data analysis.
Discuss how Benford's law remains independent of currency or scale and how Excel can apply it to read observations and guide next steps if data do not comply.
Challenges are multifarious. Overwhelming nos. of transactions, loss of conventional (paper) audit trail, system based controls, ever increasing and complex compliance requirements are amongst the prime reasons why traditional methods of collecting and evaluating evidence (like vouching and verification) are no longer adequate. The auditor can no longer treat Information Systems as a ‘Black Box’ and audit around it. His methods and techniques have to change. This change is what the world calls today, ‘Assurance Analytics’ i.e. data analysis from an ‘audit perspective’.
Using advance features of MS Excel, the auditor can access client’s data from their databases and analyse it to discharge the onerous duty cast on him. Since over 15 years, CA Nikunj Shah has been perfecting these techniques of ‘assurance analytics’. These include digital analysis techniques like Benford’s Law, Relative Size Factor Theory (RSF) and Pareto’s 80-20 rule that have enabled auditors and forensic investigators to identify control failures and over rides, detect non-compliance with laws, zero down on questionable transactions and identify red flags lost in millions of transactions. It is like quickly finding the needle in a hay stack!! In this unique course, your favourite instructor shall share the best of his research, auditing and training experience. The participants shall learn, step-by-step, the nuts-and-bolts details of using advance features of Microsoft® Excel coupled with the instructor’s insights to apply them in real-world audit situations. Each section shall equip participants with assurance analytic techniques using real-world examples and learn-by-doing exercises.