Data is at the centre of financial reporting and the auditing process. It can tell you a lot, objectively, about your business – and helps you to build a picture of a moment in time, spot unexpected outliers and exposure points, as well as trends for future strategy development.

But it is often an untapped resource for your business, not captured completely and efficiently or harnessed to its fullest capacity to give you actionable insights.

Technology is transforming the audit process: safeguarding and promoting transparency; enhancing accuracy and precision; and meaningfully impacting your decision-making process.

It’s a balance between accessing the right data analytics tools and technology for your needs and objectives, with an audit team skilled in asking the right questions and identifying what this data can tell you.

Grant Thornton’s data assurance team uses a range of data analytic tools and techniques across all phases of the auditing process, complementing and supporting your audit engagement team. We can extract large amounts of data from a range of data points within your organisation, and present and articulate the findings in ways that are not only simple, but also commercially-focused. This means effective and accurate proof points for sound and robust decision-making, identifying anomalies or high risk areas, and assisting the business to increase performance and productivity overall.

A case by case approach

We draw from a range of innovative data analytics and automation tools, and build a personalised approach dictated by your specific circumstances, objectives and needs.

Our core data assurance offering is embedded into our audit process providing a modern, standardised and effective audit testing. We understand your scope and data points relevant to your organisation and industry, and develop a tailored audit program. It incorporates data from multiple sources as well as automation that allows rapid development of bespoke and real-time analysis and benchmarking capability.

Bringing your data to life

How people – and business leaders – consume insights is very individual. When the insights gained from data are not clearly articulated, it can be meaningless.

There are many ways to bring static data to life for the purpose of better understanding your data, what it means and identifying ineffective controls or processes. Our team employs a range of visualisation techniques and tools to complement our data findings.

This allows us to not only review your data for audit purposes and provide added insights throughout the audit process, but also clearly highlight anomalies and identify root causes and, therefore, support development of a plan to address these.