ACL Continuous Monitoring Services Overview
Sunera offers a variety of continuous monitoring programs utilizing the Audit Command Language (ACL) software tool (www.acl.com) that have been developed by our team and implemented at some of our best clients to not only provide effective controls monitoring but to also help achieve cost savings. We use ACL to interrogate large amounts of transactional data and develop custom scripts to meet our client’s program needs. Each program has been tested and proven to provide accurate results.
ACL Continuous Monitoring Programs
- Payroll / Minimum Wage – We can extract hours and pay rate information by location and compared this data to minimum wage laws by state/city and determine where our client was over and underpaying. We are able to analyze the data and determine where pay rates vary outside of normal amounts for certain wage categories and where the company is incorrectly supplementing pay for inaccurate tip reporting, as well as paying minimum wage levels for staff less than 18 years old.
- Consolidation / General Ledger – We can create a continuous monitoring program to identify any changes to a chart of accounts that may impact financial reporting including the mapping to financial statement line items.
- Fixed Assets – We can create a program to identify errors in fixed asset balances such as items classified to the incorrect asset class, incorrect amounts of depreciation, and items that are being amortized beyond lease terms by matching asset locations to leasing data.
- Accounts Payable – Our accounts payable scripts can identify duplicate payments in procurement data by comparing invoices paid for same vendor, invoice, date etc. in various combinations.
- Purchasing – Our purchasing program utilizes ACL to identify vendors that may have links to employees of the organization, and follow up on possible conflicts.
- Expenses – We can identify peculiarities and irregularities in items claimed on expense reports including types of expenses outside normal ranges as well as amounts that are not in accordance with reimbursement policies.
ACL Continuous Monitoring Client Examples
Comparison of Disparate Systems
Leasing terms per lease database versus fixed asset amortization terms
Comparison of point-of-sale data to general ledger balances and 3rd party source data – gift cards
General Ledger
Monthly & weekly reports to identify changes in chart of accounts mapping to financial statement line items
Test of monthly ACL produced financial statements to Hyperion
Allows more limited controls over Hyperion
Identification of non-routine journal entries recorded each month
Eliminates routine entries from approval process
Use techniques to identify routine entries, such as JE patterns (reclass), cost allocations, and other entries affecting balances proved and reconciled elsewhere
Fixed Assets Data Integrity
Run anytime during month, but especially before close identifies the following:
Additions misclassified (eg. Laptops within “furniture”)
Assets with incorrect terms
Assets with incorrect amortization amounts
Assets with incorrect type codes(addition, disposal etc)
Prepares actual rollforward by company allocating assets by addition, disposal, transfers, capex, accruals etc.
Setup as a temporary control remediation until something more permanent can be configured within Lawson, but still functioning currently and will be for some time
Wage Testing
Comparing ADP to minimum wage rates for tipped and non-tipped employees
Setup federal, state and local wage levels within ACL
Payroll
Extract from ADP pdf reports, all employee payment data and total by company, and compare to journal entries
Compare net pay to bank ACH information to identify fraud or duplicates
Look for payroll fraud by identifying duplicate or similar addresses, names, and unusual residential addresses
Wire Testing
Convert pdf reports from BOA and Wachovia to parse out all transactions
Identify entities that have had a change in wire transfer information
Identify new wire entities to be matched to manual approval by CFO
Accounts Payable Duplicates
