Best Practices in Detecting and Preventing T&E Abuse

The abuse and misuse of Travel and Expense claims impacts multiple areas of a business: finance, compliance, reputation, culture and morale with damaging effects. Abusers know the system and work it to their advantage.

Advanced data analytics can be used to automatically monitor expense reports and helps to reduce the number of inappropriate claims.

This paper examines the most common tactics for rogue expenses and their impact and showcases how an exception-based approach can help to eliminate misuses and inaccuracies, enabling and enforcing the company T&E policy.

The Third Wave in Shared Services. Driving Continuous Improvement. 

by Dan French, CEO, Consider Solutions  

Accounting Shared Services are a central plank of any finance transformation targeting a world class finance capability. They are a key finance tool for efficiency and enabler for strategic flexibility, but achieving the standardization required to drive the desired cost efficiencies in Shared Services is a difficult business in practice.

The Compliance Tool - Audit Check-list

by Jan Hurda, Business Consultant at Consider Solutions  

 The Compliance Tool - Risk-Based Segregation of Duties 

by Jan Hurda, Business Consultant at Consider Solutions  

Closing the Loop on the Remediation Cycle - Managing your Compensating Controls 

by Jan Hurda, Business Consultant at Consider Solutions  

You have a Continuous Monitoring tool up and running in your environment with all critical systems connected.  Most likely a risk-based assessment of the critical authorizations has been conducted and a common understanding and agreement achieved across the business, IT, compliance functions and external audit. 

All your functional authorizations (e.g. SAP roles) now pass all risk checks and you have remediated the users with the highest violations by reorganising employee duties and segregating user access. You arrived at a point where no further reorganisation and distribution among the team is possible or feasible.

•    How can you manage and mitigate the risk of residual violations? 

•    What is a compensating control and what does it look like?

•    What are the main cost drivers behind compensating controls?

•    How to turn cost drivers into opportunities? 

Next generation Continuous Monitoring

Insights for the CFO and Audit committee.

By Juergen Mueller, Partner – PwC & Dan French, CEO – Consider Solutions

Assuring the organisational cardio-vascular system

Today’s standard practice in business assurance is focused on symptoms of problems, followed by diagnosis and cure. This approach has significant risks in itself. If you consider the human body, we have learned in recent decades that for many illnesses there are markers in the blood system long before a medical problem exhibits symptoms. In the same way, long before symptoms are apparent in the organization, there are markers in the information systems and processes of the business. Click read more to register for white paper download.

Continuous Audit - Technology Enabled Continuous Assurance

by Dan French, CEO Consider solutions,presented at the NACACS Conference in Las Vegas, May 2011

‘Continuous Audit’ has been discussed and written about for decades. Conferences are run and books get written on the subject. But to this day, the definition is hard to pin down and there is quite a lot of semantic debate about what it is and is not. This debate is most fierce when exploring the perceived differences between Continuous Audit and Continuous Monitoring. Continuous Audit and Continuous Monitoring require technology, but they are not technology projects, they are business change programs. This white paper provides insight, experience and best practice as well as challenging some assumptions. Click read more to register for white paper download.

Managers should behave as if they were owners

By Alan Cane
Published: July 8 2009 16:34 | Last updated: July 8 2009 16:34
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

No man is a hero to his valet, it is said, and few chief executives are heroes to their chief information officers. Here’s a reason why.
The first green shoots of recovery might be starting to appear, albeit tentatively, and with them fears that nothing has been learned and that further measures will have to be imposed on companies to prevent greed, unreasonable optimism and stupidity from hurling the global economy into another mess.

Five Ways Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) Is Supporting Risk-Management Programs

by John Becker, Chief Executive Officer at Approva.

By providing an objective way to monitor risks on a continuous basis CCM is helping CFOs make the transition their boards are demanding: from a focus on controls to a focus on risk; from a backward-facing posture to a more strategic forward-looking approach; and from a cost-driven mentality to a performance-driven viewpoint.

User Access Monitoring - Top 3 Value-Adds 

Many of you use the Approva Continuous Monitoring platform to monitor for user access risk in your ERP system. For those who have the platform in place, how can you get more business value?

Here are the Top 3 Value-Adds:  

Top 10 Exceptions in Purchase-to-Pay

The use of automation to monitor risk and performance in key financial business processes is growing. The processes are executed in ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle and all the transactional data is stored within these systems, meaning it can be monitored using automated tools. But where do you start? As food for thought we have listed the top 10 P2P exceptions being monitored by our customers using the Approva Continuous Monitoring platform.

Dan French of Consider Solutions presented at IACON 2010 'Taking the Internal Audit Profession Forward' on the topic of 'Continuous Auditing: Technology Enabled Continuous Assurance'.

T-Mobile UK, with a nudge from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, found a better way to monitor and manage access controls with its ERP system.

Global Consumer Goods

The senior management of this client aspired to a complete, continuous, repeatable and sustainable business and IT controls monitoring strategy. Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM), rather than periodic, sample-based reviews and reporting, was needed to achieve the efficiencies and effectiveness required for global processes and controls to provide genuine, demonstrable financial assurance to the board.

Two hundred years of forward thinking

In the financial sector in particular, organisations that are able to use technology to innovate and enhance their business practices will gain competitive advantage. This case study examines Schroders’s decision to develop a fresh approach to its intranet, utilising Consider Solutions’ experience of building collaborative knowledge networks.

Ordering what your supplier delivers – Is that right?

Author: Steve Rooney

The standard procurement process in large companies typically follows the sequence:

 The party requiring the goods raise a requisition detailing what is needed. The procurement department sources the goods, identifying candidate suppliers and negotiating the optimum deal. As part of supplier selection the procurement professional takes into account approved suppliers, ability to deliver, existing business with the supplier, price and available discounts. After the supplier selection the Purchase Order is placed and some time later the goods are delivered, the supplier sends an invoice and payment is made.

 … the revenue perspective

By: Steve Rooney

For most companies the effectiveness of how cash flow is managed is a key factor in the overall financial management of the business and, for some companies, can make the difference between success and failure. Getting paid and getting paid as soon as possible means your company has the cash it is due and can make that cash work to sustain and work for the business.

Similarly, discounting policy can have a major impact on revenues … not all business may be good business. If you end up discounting too far and eroding your margins you may be maintaining revenues at the expense of profit.