#AUDITDATALEADERS

How often does your team give you reports in PPT or in Excel, and you wonder how accurate they are. How much time should you spend reviewing them? Or should you trust them?

If your reports about margin per product are wrong, are you investing in the wrong products and making the company lose money? If your reports about sales performance are wrong, are you giving commissions to the wrong salespeople? If your reports about productivity are wrong, are you promoting the wrong operations managers? If your reports about stock movements are wrong, are you paying too much for storage of items that don’t sell and omitting posting provisions for slow rotation? Maybe you are even buying products that don’t sell.

A friend of mine, who is CFO of one of the largest groups in France, said to me once, the only way to see if anything is up, is to tie it back to the bank statement. Every time, he said, that is how I can see the funny stuff.

What he means is, if your general ledger matches your bank statement, and your third-party disbursements are matched to your invoices, and your invoices are matched to your sales and purchasing and if your sales orders and purchase orders are matched to your stock movements, then everything fits together like a puzzle. If it doesn’t fit together like a puzzle you can’t start to see the gaps.

At Aufinia we have built a framework of 300 data analytics tests for SAP that all tie back to the bank statement and the financial reports. This way, you can easily see the gaps in your company and you can easily benchmark all those reports to these numbers to make sure that your puzzle adds up.