Your clients have a lot of untapped data. You are in the perfect position to aggregate this data to better understand your clients’ businesses and what makes them tick. Data analytics will help you identify trends and anticipate client needs so you can provide strategies to help grow their business.
Some accounting firms leverage data analytics to better serve their tax and financial planning clients. These firms are extrapolating specific information from a tax return and then use data analytics to aggregate it with other financial data to get a holistic picture of their clients’ finances.
Many organizations recognize the value of data analytics but need help getting started. If your firm has the right expertise, you can offer data analytics advisory services to help companies implement the technology.
Audit data analytics, or ADAs, are a technique that can help your firm leverage current technologies to move toward a more data-driven approach to planning or performing an audit.
ADAs make it possible for financial statement auditors to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of audits by:
You can use ADAs to perform a variety of procedures to gather audit evidence. As you process and analyze the data, you might gain new insights that you can share with clients.
How firms are delivering value with audit data analytics
Audit Data Analytics to Audit Procedures Mapping Document
Data can be a powerful tool to guide business decisions. But first you need to make sure it’s reliable, complete and accurate. You need to know the purpose for which it was generated and whether it’s complete and reliable for that purpose. The AICPA’s criteria for evaluating a set of data can guide you in determining the relevance and integrity of data.
The AICPA’s Audit Data Standards can also help create a standardized, repeatable process for gathering data in a useable format. These non-authoritative, uniform IT standards identify the key information that auditors need and provide a common framework to standardize client data. Before performing an ADA, check with your client to see if they follow these standards. If they do, you can spend less time formatting the data and more time on analysis.
