Conceptual Model of Accounts - Closing the Gap between Financial Statements and Business Process Modeling

Abstract

A comprehensive understanding of business processes is crucial for an in-depth audit of a company's financial reporting and regulatory compliance. Recent major financial scandals impressively demonstrate the insufficiency of today's audit methods. The most discussed method for improving the current state of things are process audits because well-controlled business processes lead to correct preparation, presentation, and disclosure of financial statements. In an attempt to improve the support of business process auditors, we present a conceptual model to close the gap between processes and their financial impacts. This conceptual model introduces accounts and associated booking-items making financial impacts visible. It is then integrated into the meta-model of a business process modeling language, namely the extended event-driven process chain. Moreover, this paper demonstrates an exemplary implementation with notational elements supporting the visualization of financial impacts. The paper ends with a questionnaire-based expert evaluation revealing that the proposed artifact is positively assessed overall.