Azalia Shamsaei

Our latest release of MindBridge Ai Auditor is another leap forward, with plenty of great features to help auditors throughout the audit process. Keep reading to find lots to love about this release.

Task creation and sample selection

Auditors can select samples, either manually or by using our Intelligent Sampler, to stratify the population of financial data by risk rating. Creating tasks in Ai Auditor allows your team members to work collaboratively to investigate anomalies in your client’s data.

In this release, you can create tasks and leverage the Intelligent Sampler on individual line entries. Prior to this release, you could only use the feature on transactions.

You can create filters and select samples manually by creating tasks on individual line entries which will be added to your audit plan. You can also leverage the Intelligent Sampler to stratify sample selection on entry view as described in the next section.

When you go to the Data Table tab, you can click on a transaction and see the individual line entries associated with a transaction, as shown in Figure 1.You can switch to the entries view by clicking on the Transactions button on the top right corner of the page, as illustrated in Figure 2.As seen above, you can launch Intelligent Sampler from the Entries View and you can create tasks on a line item by clicking on the  button to add details to your task creation, including audit area for account balances or significant classes of transactions, as well as the related management assertion for the test being performed, as shown in Figure 3.You can also bulk select by checking the box on an individual line item and select the appropriate action item from the Actions drop-down as illustrated in Figure 4.Once you create a task on an entry, it will be added to your audit plan page.

Intelligent Sampler

Auditors can select samples, by using Intelligent Sampler, to stratify the population of financial data by risk rating. In this release, we have improved the Intelligent sampler, as shown in Figure 5.

We have added a random sampling option to the sampling method to create a truly random sample from the population generated in the applied filter. Each item in the population has an equal chance of being selected.

The default sampling method is risk-rated that uses the entry or transaction risk score to stratify the population generated in the applied filter. This method is unique to Ai Auditor, and favors selecting the majority of the sample from the high and medium risk transactions.

You now have the ability to add Audit Area, Management Assertions, and sample name to the sample selection. You can also add multiple samples to the same population. In addition, we provide a visualization that shows the $ value of the selected samples for each risk bucket (high, medium, and low risk) and the total $ value of all the populations for the sample. This can be used to reconcile the total population for created filters to worksheets used for sample size calculation.

You can click on “Add to audit plan” to add the sample to the Audit Plan.

Audit plan

The audit plan is one of our many exports that provide sufficient and appropriate audit evidence to support the audit opinion. In particular, the audit plan provides a summary of items selected using Ai Auditor while preparing to perform a test of details.

On the Audit Plan page, we now provide more filters, allowing you to filter by audit area to understand the areas you have looked into and what management assertions you have selected samples for. The visualization at the top of the page has been updated to highlight the $ value for the selected filter.

All items added to the audit plan can be searched or filtered in various ways to provide a convenient overview of your sample selection.From the Audit Plan page, you can view the revised Audit Plan Export as a Microsoft Excel or CSV document as a source of audit evidence to be saved in your working paper solution. We have also improved the performance of the CSV export for large files.

You can export the entire plan into Excel or CSV format by clicking on the Export Entire Plan button or add filters to create a simplified list of items for your client to prepare for your inspection by clicking on “Export Filtered Plan”.

We have also enhanced the audit export details for this release. We now show a summary of the engagement, date, and analysis name, as well as filters that have been applied to the audit plan, if any, in the Summary tab, as shown in Figure 7.In the Data Tab, there are three buckets that illustrate information about the transaction and/or entries, tasks, and Control Points. We have added the entries to the audit plan, as well as the audit area and assertion names. Another improvement to the audit plan is that we now show the risk scoring of each Control Point for each entry in the audit plan.

Large transaction support

Transactions that contain a large number of entries can be present in financial data for a number of different reasons, for example, a daily point of sale summary where a number of ‘micro-transactions’ are recorded into a larger ‘daily’ transaction.

These types of transactions can limit an auditor’s ability to assess the true transaction risk or identify problematic entries. In Ai Auditor, large transactions are also often given higher risk scores due to the fact that a large number of entries contribute in a disproportionate way to the overall transaction risk score versus other transactions with smaller numbers of entries.

To this end, we now recognize and suggest alternatives for the treatment of large transactions. During the loading of data in the Review Data stage, as illustrated in Figure 9, Ai Auditor displays statistics about the file, including details about the number of transactions and their corresponding number of entries. Through the new design of the Review Data page, you can quickly understand that there are 27108 transactions in your file and 509 of them are very large transactions as illustrated in the transaction length summary visualization.

Ai Auditor now allows the user to apply an operation to the file, the Smart Splitter, to decompose each large transaction down to its matching entries, where each entry pair is identified by matching offsetting debits and credits. After running Smart Splitter there are no transactions with 501-1000 entries.For example:Each matching pair is then labelled as a new smaller transaction in the file where it can be risk scored along with other transactions in the file.

When selecting the Smart Splitter option, you have the ability to select the fields within the file to use as the primary transaction ID. This selection is then used to process the file and match containing entries, after which a preview is displayed to the user prior to committing to the operation on the entire file.

At the completion of the Smart Splitter operation, all transactions will run through the Smart Splitter, and the user continues with the analysis, where they will see new transactions appearing in the analysis with updated identifiers representing each entry within the transaction.

Create engagement

We improved the engagement creation page and added planning Date and Final Analysis Date. The Planning Date field is used to approximate the period available for interim work. This date is the earliest date for which you intend on having data from your client to use in planning. This field is optional but must occur before the final analysis date. Adding a planning date helps our Customer Success team prioritize and time your engagement.

The Final Analysis Date is the date that you intend on receiving the data from your client. This field is now a required field as it helps our Customer Success team plan any intervention work (if required). The Engagement Lead is the primary contact responsible for leading the audit. They will receive any and all proactive communications from our Customer Success team about ERP documentation, support, etc.

Enhancements to Libraries

In the May release of Ai Auditor, we introduced the Library feature to provide further flexibility to administrators to tailor the work done based on the industry that your client operates in.

Libraries contain all the business logic needed to perform analysis within a particular industry or market and allow you to customize an analysis based on industry types with different ratios, filters, and Control Points.

Through Libraries, you find the right information at the right time, and this is a big step forward in helping you complete your work faster and with greater transparency. Libraries give you a way to build standardized audit approaches. In the previous releases of the Library feature, you could customize ratios, and filters only.

In this release, we continue to extend the functionality of Libraries by allowing you to edit Control Point weightings within a Library that can be leveraged and reused across an Engagement. As shown in Figure 13, you can change the weighting of each Control Point through the scroll bar and you can save or discard changes.

Activity Report

In this release, the administrator can now track and collect user actions and behavior to get a complete timeline of all user activities to establish the events that have occurred and who caused them. The Activity Report, as shown in Figure 14, answers the ‘who, what, when, where, and how’ of all the user activities in Ai Auditor. With the Activity Report, administrators get precise information on critical events such as user logins, time of file load, time of analysis, and more.

The administrator can also go to Activity Tab and download the Activity Report. They can filter on date range and user, as well as select the event categories such as who created the engagement, organization, ingestion, and more.

Figure 15 illustrates an example of the Activity Report that shows the times when the user:

• Created the analysis
• Deleted the analysis
• Logged into Ai Auditor
• Deleted and created some tasks
• Created a Library called “Insurance”

Our latest release of MindBridge Ai Auditor is another leap forward, with plenty of great features to help auditors throughout the audit process. Keep reading to find lots to love about this release.

Enhancements to Libraries

In the May release of Ai Auditor, we introduced the Library feature to provide further flexibility to administrators to tailor the work done in Ai Auditor based on the industry that your client operates in.

Libraries contain all the business logic needed to perform analysis within a particular industry or market and allow you to customize an analysis based on industry types with different ratios, filters, and Control Points.

Through Libraries, you find the right information at the right time, and this is a big step forward in helping you complete your work faster and with greater transparency. Libraries give you a way to build standardized audit approaches. In the first release of the Library feature, custom ratios could be built, edited, and saved within a Library.

In this release, we continue to extend the functionality of Libraries by allowing you to define and store custom filters within a Library that can be leveraged and reused across an Engagement. Your firm can build up a suite of standard audit tests, focusing on particular transactions, and reuse them from client to client. To get you started, we’ve provided some predefined filters as illustrated in Figure 1. You can also construct and add your filters as illustrated in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 1: Predefined filters in Ai Auditor

Figure 2: Adding and editing filters in Libraries

Figure 3: The Filter Builder

Enhancements to ratios

During the creation of an engagement, users can ensure the data is being correctly analyzed by selecting a Library that contains the proper financial ratios. The ratios correspond to the Library and are made available on the Trending tab in Ai Auditor. The administrator in a Library sets all default ratios.

We’ve recognized that the engagement team may need to define specific ratios for the engagements under review that are not defined in the selected Library. Therefore, in this release, we allow anyone who has access to the engagement to define a ratio through the Ratio Builder (Figure 4) and save it to the engagement. You can also customize the Trending tab by deleting or editing the custom ratios in the engagement as illustrated in Figure 5.

Once the engagement team has found a particularly useful ratio for a single client, an administrator can promote this ratio into the Library so that it is available immediately across all the clients sharing that Library.

Figure 4: Ratio Builder

Figure 5: Modifying custom ratio from an engagement

We have also made ratios easier to explain and understand by making a ratio’s calculation and values visible from the Trending tab’s ratio graph. As illustrated in the figure below, you can hover over a data point to see more information. Clicking on the data point now allows you to toggle between viewing a “value view” or “formula view” for each data point.

Figure 6: Viewing a data point’s information

 Figure 7: Toggling between formula and value views

Custom account groupings

Have you ever wanted to leverage and see your own client account numbers and account groupings in Ai Auditor rather than using the MindBridge Account Classification (MAC) codes?

In this release, we are thrilled to provide this capability in the product. Let’s elaborate more on the details and explain where you’ll see and make use of your own account codes instead of MAC codes.

MAC codes in Ai Auditor

Prior to this release, when mapping your accounts, Ai Auditor would automatically map your accounts to the MAC codes. This meant that everyone had to use these codes everywhere in the platform. For example, the Filter Builder illustrated in Figure 8 is based on MindBridge Account Classification codes.

Figure 8: The account hierarchy in Filter Builder – Old style MAC-based

Custom account codes in Ai Auditor

With this update, Ai Auditor now supports custom account groupings. Administrators can upload their custom grouping using the MindBridge Microsoft Excel template. If using CCH Working Papers, administrators can upload a group trial balance via the ACCOUNT GROUPINGS section under ADMIN, as illustrated in Figures 9 and 10.

Once the account grouping is loaded into Ai Auditor, it can be referenced by a Library and used to create filters and ratios that can be used in an engagement. All the users who have access to that engagement see the new account grouping everywhere throughout the product. Figure 11 illustrates an example of the custom grouping in the Filter Builder.

Figure 9: Import Custom Account Grouping

Figure 10: Managing custom Account Groupings

Figure 11: Using a custom account grouping in Filter Builder

Improvements to Control Points

As the year progresses, you will see a lot of new Control Point enhancements making their way into Ai Auditor. One popular piece of feedback received from customers is to provide more detailed explanations for Control Points. Our users want more insight as to why a certain transaction fired a certain Control Point, or how the Risk Score was determined.

In response to this, we’ve added more details pertaining to each Control Point, and why a transaction would trigger it. This helps you better understand our Control Points, how they function, and the associated risk.

We’ve added more detailed information for each Control Point with new tooltips. Clicking the tooltip icon in the upper right of each Control Point tile, as shown in figure 12, provides you with more information on each Control Point.

Figure 12: Control Point tiles

We have included a “Learn More” link within each tooltip that takes you to more documentation for each Control Point. We’ve also added a robust chart for the Benford Control Point (Figure 13) that is based on your actual data, providing more context and identifying numbers appearing at higher frequencies. This new visualization gives auditors an intuitive sense for why a Control Point has triggered and provides greater insight to auditors examining transactions that may contain an outlier.

Figure 13: Control Point detail

Not-For-Profit analysis improvements

Interim analysis support for Not-For-Profit (NFP)

In the May release of Ai Auditor, we introduced support for Not-For-Profit (NFP) General Ledger (GL) analyses. In this release, we’ve expanded this functionality to support a General Ledger (Interim) analysis, allowing you to upload a partial GL file and analyze the available data.

An example of an interim analysis would be 9 months of GL activity. You can return to this analysis at a later point once you have the remaining GL data, facilitating a continuous and seamless workflow.

You can also add data from previous years to the analysis, allowing you to view and identify trends. Currently, you can compare your current GL against up to five years of historical data in the year-over-year trended view for your NFP analysis.

Figure 14: General Ledger (Interim) support for NFP analysis

Figure 15: Support for previous years in a NFP analysis

Improvements to data ingestion

In this release, column mapping settings are available to view after completing a data ingestion. These changes make finding missteps in the mapping process much easier, resulting in higher quality support for issues or errors regarding column mapping.

We’ve also made improvements to the transaction ID generator in the review data stage. When performing a GL analysis, if you’re carrying forward the interim analysis, you no longer need to create a transaction ID. Ai Auditor recommends the appropriate transaction ID based on the interim analysis previously performed.

Figure 16: Column mapping

Figure 17: Carrying forward the interim analysis transaction ID

Welcome to the “post-busy season” release of Ai Auditor, just in time for your Not-for-Profit audit engagements! Our new release of Ai Auditor includes a host of new features that enable more use cases, such as Accountant Reviews. This release includes several great features including:

Libraries: Contains all the business logic needed to perform analysis within a particular industry or market and allows you to customize analysis based on industry types with different ratios, filters, and Control Points.

Ratio Builder: Enables you to build and save ratios that are relevant to your clients and industry. Analyzing finances with these custom ratios can help you identify trends and other data that inform essential business decisions.

Not-for-profit: We have introduced not-for-profit (NFP) General Ledger analysis support, allowing you to perform financial analysis for NFPs with and without a fund-based structure (fund accounting).

Annotations and exporting analytics: Allows you to document and store insights gained during the planning of an audit or an analytical review to create supplementary documentation without the need for other tools.

Let’s dive deeper into each area.

Libraries

Do you make use of specific filters when you perform an audit for a healthcare client vs. a construction engagement? Do you have particular ratios that you track during the planning phase for different industries? Do you wish you could customize Ai Auditor based on an industry type with different ratios?

In this release, we’re introducing the concept of a Library. Libraries help you tailor the work done in Ai Auditor based on the industry that your client operates in. Libraries are used to manage and maintain the financial ratios needed for a specific type of analysis. In our next release, the ability to change filters and Control Points will be added to Libraries to simplify the selection of settings for different types of analysis. We’re making sure that you’re always doing the most relevant work possible so that you can differentiate your firm and drive profits. Libraries also allow you to reuse configurations across different users and departments within your firm.

An Administrator can create a new Library under the Libraries tab in the Admin section of Ai Auditor. Creating a library allows admins to define their own custom ratios, filters, or Control Point weighting so that you’re always seeing the right information.

To get you started, we’ve released two new NFP libraries along with the for-profit library, our original analysis type.When creating a new engagement, there is now a selection available in the engagement creation section where you can choose from the available Libraries. Choosing a Library selects the financial ratios that you’ll see in your analysis.You can construct and add ratios to Libraries. In this release, filters and Control Points will be read-only. In a future release, filters and Control Points will be included in Libraries for additions and configuration.

Through Libraries, you will find the right information at the right time, and this is a big step forward in helping you complete your work faster and with greater transparency.

Ratio builder

We recognized that the ratios presented were not always the most relevant for your client, and in many cases, alternate ratios or different types of calculations were required. Administrators now have the ability to define new ratios at the Library level. If, for example, the ratio of “Staff cost to Revenue” is particularly important for your client, we want to make sure that information is always at your fingertips.

When creating a ratio, users can select from any account or account level within the account structure, as well as specify different balance amounts such as the closing balance, opening balance, or the monthly movement. They can string together multiple accounts to create complex ratios, which can be saved for reuse in the Library.

Each custom ratio, as illustrated in the image below, contains a ratio name, a category (i.e., Activity, Profitability) and numerator and denominator for the ratio formula. Account amounts, specific values, and constants within the ratio builder can be included in ratio formulas. These values are displayed to the user for selection in the Add drop-down.When an engagement is created, a Library is selected from the list of available Libraries. The ratios corresponding to the Library, are made available on the Trending dashboard.

Not-for-profit support

NFP organizations are often complex, with restrictions in place that dictate the way they can spend and the way they handle income streams. NFPs can often be risky entities to audit and their books can be complicated and sometimes messy.

To support NFP analysis, we’ve updated our account grouping hierarchy to include NFP concepts such as contributions, pledges, grants, funds, and restricted and unrestricted net assets. You can leverage the new NFP-augmented account grouping through the selection of supplied Libraries.

To complement NFP analysis, we have added specific NFP-based ratios such as Liquid Funds Amount, and Defensive Interval, along with many more. With the new Ratio Builder feature, you’re also free to add your own as well.

With NFP analysis, we’ve also developed new Control Points to support specific types of industry analysis for NFP.

In this release, we’re providing two new libraries for NFP.

NFP Library

The NFP Library has an updated account grouping structure to suit NFP concepts such as contributions, grants, and new ratios specific to NFP, such as Operating Reserve, Change in Net Assets, and Operating Margin. We’ve also added a new Control Point that looks for abnormal amounts of expense activity.

NFP-Fund Library

The NFP-Fund Library supports fund-based accounting. If your client uses funds to separate accounts for tracking and reporting purposes, this is the Library to use.

This Library comes with an updated account grouping structure to suit NFP and fund concepts. When you create an engagement, you can choose this Library and upload an augmented Chart of Accounts (COA). For the fund-based NFP analysis, you are required to include a Fund ID and optional Fund Description column in your COA file.

Note that for a Wolters Kluwer CCH fund-based NFP analysis, Fund ID details will be ingested automatically from the CCH General Ledger file and do not need to be added to the COA file. When ingesting a CCH General Ledger file, Fund ID details will be pulled from the “Group” code in the CCH General Ledger file.

For fund-based NFP analysis, we’ve introduced several new Control Points, such as Fund Expense Flurry, Interfund Transfer, and Split Expense that offer quick and easy ways for you to identify transactions of interest in an NFP’s General Ledger.

Annotations and analytics export

This feature provides the ability for you to document and store insights observed during audit planning or analytical review to assist in getting that information into audit documentation without recreating in other tools.

As you are exploring trends and ratios, you can add annotations to each graph under the Trending tab. Annotations, graphs, and the underlying data can then be exported into Microsoft Excel for inclusion in final reports and papers.

In addition to having a list of annotations on each graph on the Trending tab, you can view a list of all annotations on the Annotations tab and filter by account to find all annotations related to an account as well as the corresponding charts and visualizations.

Conclusion

This release is driven by our philosophy that it’s important for auditors and accountants to both customize and automate what they are doing. By giving you the proper tools to create and organize, we’re setting the foundations for even more powerful features in the future!

MindBridge Ai Auditor continues to make improvements to deliver the best experience possible. For this release, we’ve made improvements to data ingestion, making it easier to get client data into the platform.

User file format confirmation

Data is the fuel that powers our machine learning, statistics, and rules-based analysis in Ai Auditor. Data loaded into the product must be free of syntactical errors and be in formats that allow for data analysis. We’ve automated this process as much as possible, however, in some rare cases, we’re unable to detect the proper file format without manual intervention. In this release, we’ve improved this process.

We’ve added the ability to confirm the format of a data file before proceeding to the column mapping and review data stages. You’re presented with a drop-down (see below) on the Select Data page that’s pre-filled with the format that we’ve detected. If desired, you can change the format.

Page after uploading a file

Example of options in the drop-down

Multiple date formats

Another improvement to the data ingestion process is added support for multiple date formats within a single column of a data file.

Prior to this enhancement, if a file contained more than one date format, manual intervention was required to adjust the data into a supported format.

In this release, you’re prompted for date format clarification after columns are mapped to ensure that it’s correct. This capability automatically recognizes a variety of formats to help save time during the data ingestion process.