Hello Alteryx Community!
I’m an Assurance Associate at an audit firm, working in the UK. I’m looking for ideas/examples of how you could use Alteryx in an external audit context to make certain tests quicker and more efficient.
A few of my colleagues and I have started implementing it for simple tasks, such as filtering transactional data for certain GL codes to generate listings, and formatting, data cleansing and unioning system-generated reports for consistency. Our Data team also uses Alteryx in Journals testing, using a join on the opening and closing TB to search for new GL codes. It then performs a completeness check by summing all the debits and credits from the transactional data to reconcile them to the closing TB.
I’ve seen a couple of great examples in the Alteryx Use Cases section of the site. @Itay_K has built a workflow to automate reconciliations by using optical character recognition (OCR) on reports and documents, which can be used for bank recs (see ‘KPMG Netherlands is Digitizing Auditing with Alteryx’ post). There’s a cool workflow from @cgoodman3 which also uses OCR to search over 1,000 documents downloaded from Companies House for a specific search criteria (see ‘Automatically Download PDF Documents from UK Companies House’ post).
I’d love to hear from anyone working in external audit who has managed to implement Alteryx in their testing.
Thanks!
Paul
Hey @pengland17,
Great to hear of your Alteryx journey so far! I also work in a team that supports external audit and would be interested in any suggestions that people have.
Happy Alteryxing 😉
Hi, there,
same in PwC - we started using Alteryx in external audit procedures this season. So far it's been mainly used to cleanse messy chronologies and use Union tool to forge them together.
I've used it in Risk Assurance as well - here's a workflow for JET (Journal Entry Testing):
JET Testing Workflow
I'm very new to Alteryx and I work in a small audit practice.
I would like to use Alteryx to manage account receivables confirmations. Does anyone have experience of doing this?
I start with a spreadsheet with year end accounts receivables balance, customer names, and a customer email address.
I want to send a unique email to each customer including the customer name and receivables balance within the text. I also want to be able to send an attachment with the email.
I'd like to be able to track whether customers have or have not responded to the email on a simple dashboard. I'd like to be able to send a reminder email to customers which haven't responded and an automatic thank you email to those who do respond.
Thanks,
James
I manage an Alteryx & Tableau server and one of our key areas of focus is controls around payments / sourcing. We use it to test for proper approvals in SAP / Arabia (Sourcing), split commitments (Sourcing), user access reviews (IS), and a number of other things. Our internal audit team and external audit both prefer to review 'manual' controls that have been automated in Alteryx vs. controls that are manually performed using Excel. The possibilities are pretty much endless, anything that took place in Excel and be done in Alteryx faster with more accuracy and less room for human error.
James,
That is absolutely possible, I have done very similar things using Alteryx + Python. I would recommend starting on the project and then positing smaller direct questions in the designer discussion when you get stuck. Here are some links to get you started. 🙂
Extracting Email Attachments: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Running-data-from-Mailbox/m-p/524837#M...
Sending Emails: https://help.alteryx.com/2018.2/Email.htm
Thanks Drew. Much appreciated!
Hi can you send sample of this workflow i am new to alteryx trying to work on some automating processes for my firm that does audit.
its a very good example. Also any suggestions for risk assessment workflows as well for audit firms
macros for calculating lease tables also the OCR tools in the intelligence suite might be a good way to go. Also use the test tool for things like joins to be comfortable with completeness etc