Towards automated financial process auditing: aggregation and visualization of process models

Abstract

Internal and external auditors face an enormous amount of financial entries in accounting information systems. For many reasons - like legal regulations - a process-oriented view of these entries is urgently needed in order to understand the way financial entries are produced in accounting information systems and to infer the underlying processes. Traditional modeling languages focus on processes but pay no regard to the financial value-flows. Furthermore, automated process retrieval approaches only reconstruct single process instances, which need to be aggregated for reasons of comprehensibility, simplification and clearness. The paper wants to close this gap and integrate the process with the accounting perspective followed by an aggregation of single process instances. As a result we present a visualization form capable of integrating the financial view with process flows. In this way, auditors are able to trace how balance sheet items have been produced in the system during the fiscal year.