Cash is King – 3 steps for finding payments made “by roundabout means”
Disbursements in SAP should follow strictly defined processes in accounting. A good internal control system can only be based on a well-defined process. Since outgoing payments have a direct effect on the assets of every company, every auditor – and of course every accounting manager too – should have a major interest in ensuring a […]
Overdelivery made easy
You pay for what you ordered! That’s usually the simple rule. However, some companies place so many orders that it is difficult to keep track of all of them and the SAP system is there to help ensure that vendors do not deliver more than was actually ordered. In this blog post, you can find […]
The digital transformation in auditing – an industry undergoing change?
At the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, an interdisciplinary team from the fields of International Business Administration & Entrepreneurship and Information Systems, headed by Prof. Dr. Drews, Prof. Dr. Funk and Prof. Dr. Velte, is conducting research on topics such as the digital transformation. We have been able to enlist the services of the PhD student […]
When the cat might as well have eaten the balance sheet
In fact, when reading the cases described below, you would probably not be surprised if even some cats would prefer to pull the covers back up over their heads again. Still, the following scandals from the recent past show that balance sheet manipulation is by no means a phenomenon of the past and one company […]
How to discover dubious posting structures in SAP
In today’s blog post, we are going to take a look at how to identify “dubious” posting structures within SAP’s financial accounting. I will show you how to quickly find posting structures in SAP and how to know which ones you should perhaps take a closer look at, because they do not meet the usual […]
Balance sheet cosmetics or manipulation?
Balance sheet manipulations have made quite an impact in the media in recent years with cases like Enron and WorldCom. But, beyond that, there has been a series of inconsistencies in the more recent past that have affected almost every industry. Recent cases include the Serie A in Italy, where two clubs are currently threatened […]
The dilemma of the weekend
In a previous series, we have already discussed the risk of postings at the weekend and demonstrated how postings of this type can be identified in SAP. However, we did not take into account that not all weekends are the same. These days, a large number of companies have units to be audited abroad, or conduct […]
Cabinet of curiosities: The story of the time when zapliance discovered a body in the trunk of a car
What happens in cases where data analysis is used to uncover something quite out of the ordinary? – Well, you guessed right… we will share the details of them with you on our blog, as long as they are brought to our attention, that is, and we have the permission to publish them from the […]
Data Science in Auditing: What exactly are decision trees and what are they used for?
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are both hot topics right now, but the audit industry is having trouble developing suitable use case scenarios. The reasons for this can be manifold, so what we would like to do here, with this series on data science, is to provide you with the basis you need […]
Is someone giving your sales revenues a “haircut”?
Giving sales revenues a “haircut” is often a way of helping managing directors and sales managers when their targets are slipping away from them. We look at this specific pattern of manipulation of sales revenues and how you can identify it in your SAP data. The sales revenue “haircut” with no effect on net income […]