Today’s audit process continues to be modelled on manual paper-driven checklists enshrined in legacy software systems. Auditors spend a significant amount of time manually collecting, reviewing, and analyzing vast volumes of financial and business process data. Even with major improvements in digital accounting tools and services, the accounting workflow remains largely based on passing Excel spreadsheets, through a series of desktop and/or SaaS software tools.
As clients’ businesses become more complex and the volume of financial data requiring review continues to grow, auditors need to move away from what has become an unscalable audit process; where audit quality is limited by how many documents a human auditor can review in a fixed timeline.
Recognizing that the central issue is the sheer amount of data that must be analyzed, many audit firms are already exploring ways to manage client data more effectively by implementing centralized, cloud-based audit packages, opening the door to what is known as the data-driven audit.
The data-driven audit approach automates the collection and analysis of the available client data to optimally inform auditor decision making. Its goal is to improve audit quality and increase audit firm efficiencies.
To help audit firms get started on data-driven audits, Vigilant AI has partnered with Polar Labs, a certified Snowflake Partner that designs and implements tailored data infrastructures and applications, to offer the first turnkey data-driven audit test platform for structured and unstructured financial data embedded into the Snowflake platform. Read their case study of the Polar Labs and Vigilant AI collaboration.
Enabling the Snowflake Platform for Audit and Accounting Firms
Snowflake is a leading Analytics and AI Data Cloud platform for data lakes, data engineering, and data science, making it an easy decision on our part to embed our features to automate the contextualization and testing of audit data into the Snowflake platform.
We recognized early on that Snowflake’s scalability, data governance, and secure inter-company sharing features make it ideally suited for the audit and accounting industry.
By embedding Vigilant’s intelligent data curation, term extraction, and audit testing features into the Snowflake platform, audit firms can automate client data capture, preserve data integrity, and provide greater value to clients all while remaining compliant with data privacy laws and industry standards.
Vigilant AI + Polar Labs
With Polar Labs, Vigilant is partnered with a certified Snowflake Partner who can help audit firms looking to implement data-driven audits unlock the full potential of their client’s data, including implementing data streaming and data sharing capabilities offered within the Snowflake ecosystem.
Polar Labs will also help your firm integrate with business intelligence and analytics tools such as ThoughtSpot to create audit visualizations driven by Vigilant’s automated testing.
Getting Started with Data-Driven Audits
By partnering with Polar Labs, Vigilant AI has created a turnkey data-driven audit test platform built on Snowflake that can provide value to audit and accounting firms in less than a month.
Audit firms gain access to a Snowflake account under the Vigilant AI organization. Once set up, firms can upload files, query key terms, run testing and analysis, and explore results through Vigilant and third-party analytics.
The combined solution expands on Snowflake’s extensive capabilities to reduce the time, cost, and resources required to collect, review, and analyze vast volumes of data. Document extraction and curation are fast, easy, and accurate, reducing the need for manual data entry and review. This, in turn, increases productivity and allows auditors to focus on reviewing areas of risk.
With this turnkey data-driven audit test platform, audit firms can overcome the challenges associated with managing and analyzing large volumes of data and perform faster, more complete, and more accurate audits without increasing cost or labour requirements.
Discover the future of financial auditing: Start your free trial today and let Vigilant AI show you the difference with one month’s worth of your data, no commitment required. Contact us today.
Recent Comments