Internal Audit Analytics services | LDU Business Services

Internal Audit Analytics

Audit transformation through innovation and technology

Capitalizing on the wealth of data now available—from your own business activities as well as external sources—can help internal audit (IA) generate valuable new insights, provide greater assurance, and rewrite the rulebook on traditional auditing techniques. By embedding analytics in every phase of the audit process, IA can assist the business in navigating a world that has become more volatile, uncertain, and complex. We call this new approach to embedding analytics into internal audit “insights-driven auditing.”

Insights-driven auditing: A multidisciplinary approach

Internal audit analytics is more effective when delivered as an integrated team. This means your core IA professionals are working together with the data science and analytics professionals and calling on subject matter specialists as appropriate. By co-developing scope, risk objectives, and approach for the internal audit and jointly participating in walk-throughs, internal auditors significantly enhance effectiveness of the analytics. In addition, a shared understanding of the process and outcomes ultimately results in an audit with a greater impact on the business.

The success of any analytics-embedded internal audit is linked to those demonstrable results that can transform your organization, particularly when they translate to financial benefits. When seeking insight from data, it is important to ask the right questions and to always challenge yourself with “so what?” for any insight produced. Linking questions to key testing hypotheses, or “what could go wrong,” can help drive the internal audit analytics approach.

Benefits of an insights-driven approach

The benefits of insights-driven auditing can be summarized into four simple statements:

Perform the same audit faster:

Improving your access to data and developing key insights before fieldwork commences; making connections and comparing performance and key benchmarks between products, processes, and business units means you focus only on what is of utmost importance and avoid merely confirming the obvious; or assessing transaction risks in real time.
Perform the same audit cheaper:

Connecting the auditor directly to the process through the data with risk analytics and data visualization allows exploratory analytics to drive a more focused audit, while still testing 100 percent of the population. Moving to automated routines over manual saves time and money.
Perform better audits:

Combining data from inside and outside your organization to add new richness and granularity to insights and understanding of risk. Benchmarks, comparative analysis, and trending enhance on-the-job learning and development while delivering a more impactful result to business stakeholders.
Make innovation a centerpiece:

Providing a rich combination of data science disciplines and using a new generation of technologies to enhance; automate; and continuously improve the audit process, reporting, and service delivery.

Proof of concept

In this new era of advanced analytics and big data, you are looking for analytical tools to harness the power of your data. It is really hard to make a decision on the selection of right analytics tools and partner. You need a tangible proof and a solid demonstration for what you are going to invest in: that’s why at LDU Business Services we are happy to create for you an individual proof of concept that will showcase the full potential of our services. It’s as easy as three steps, and will help you in your decision on whether we are a reliable partner suiting your expectations: based on a dataset of your choice that you will send us, we build a personalized data insight that you can test and show to your management or team.

Internal audit analytics