KPMG Netherlands is Digitizing Auditing with Alteryx

[Itay_K]

Author:

Itay Katz

Role:

Senior Consultant

Company:

KPMG Netherlands

Overview of Use Case

The Digital Assurance and Innovation (Dani) department of KPMG Netherlands is digitizing auditing by developing data & analytics solutions. Different teams in the department are using Alteryx to build and develop solutions in order to improve efficiency and quality of deliverables. Other than the fast development time and reducing human errors, Alteryx also provides the ability to handle large and diverse data-sets since different clients use different source systems.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

During the audit reporting periods, there are a number of challenges to face such as providing high quality deliverables on extremely tight deadlines and to a large number of clients. In addition, we receive data in different formats such as CSV / Excel / PDF / TXT etc, which makes the pre-processing tasks very time consuming. 

Describe your working solution

We've built a set of solutions and each solution is used to tackle a different situation. The solutions are packaged in macros so every user could run them with their own configuration based on the specific needs.

One of the solutions we created was to automate reconciliation of various reports and documents, for example reconciling bank statements and general ledger. The procedure includes processing of semi-structured data since the bank statements are in PDF format.

At the first step, we use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract and structure the data from the bank statements. Once the relevant information is extracted, structured and validated, the data is uploaded to Alteryx along with the general ledger. We compare the amounts stated in the bank statements and the amounts in the general ledger.

Then, we preprocess and clean the data before we finalized the reconciliation. We export various details from the reconciliation for documentation purposes since its part of the deliverables. On top of the results, we use a BI tool to create dashboards in order to present findings that are more accessible.

The process is fully standardized and automated and it saves a significant amount of time that was previously spent on manual reconciliation of the documents. The audit teams receive the results of the reconciliation and can spend more time following up on the identified outliers. 

Solution 1Solution 2Describe the benefits you have achieved

By using Alteryx we're changing the way that traditional audit is being performed. Benefits:

• Supporting large number of clients under tight deadlines

• High quality deliverables  -Reducing errors by minimizing the manual steps

• Improving efficiency by automating workflows

[arce88]

HI! nice job on your project. I might have missed it but, did you still validate your data through Alteryx? if yes what was the process like

[Itay_K]

It depends on your use case but you can use tools that send warning messages to the interface such as TEST and ERROR MESSAGE (for apps).

These tools can be very useful to identify issues and reflect them to the user.