Transaction Analysis 1

This class provides an in-depth exploration of auditing purchasing card (P-card) transactions at Oklahoma State University (OSU) with a focus on developing an analytical mindset. Students will work through a series of tasks that emphasize critical aspects of data analysis, including understanding P-card guidelines, preparing data for analysis, and using analytical tools to detect potential internal control violations or fraudulent transactions.

Why is this important?

Through practical exercises, students will gain hands-on experience in extracting, transforming, and analyzing P-card transaction data, applying forensic audit techniques, and interpreting the results to assess compliance with internal controls. The case study also emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions and applying appropriate data analytics techniques, which are crucial skills for internal auditors.

Materials:

Case: Analytics mindset: P-card.
Slides: will be available for download by the beginning of class in either powerpoint or pdf formats.
Data: A data update may be required for this class. To ensure your files are the most up-to-date, navigate to ACCTG521_Labs folder and run the command git pull.
Analytics Tools: Git and GitHub

Review and Extension:

Building on the prior class's introduction to the F-score for assessing the risk of material misstatements, this class takes a more focused approach by applying data analytics techniques to a specific audit scenario: auditing P-card transactions at Oklahoma State University. While the F-score helped students understand how to quantify misstatement risk using financial data, this class extends those analytical skills to the operational side, where students will evaluate internal controls and identify potential fraudulent or non-compliant transactions. Both classes emphasize the importance of using structured data and analytics to inform auditing decisions, but here students gain practical experience in transforming raw transaction data and applying forensic techniques to real-world cases.

Preparation:

1. The P-Card case is relatively long, we will aim to cover Parts I and II in this class and start on, or be set-up for, Part III and later (IV-VI).
2. Part I involves several discussion questions that will be handled using the discussion groups with warm call to facilitate full class discussions.
3. Part II is the primary ETL, we will undertake this for all files using Alteryx and answer the discussion questions that focus on data quality.
4. Part III is the second stage of the ETL process, and will involve some light data cleaning.
5. Please note that this case refers to Access, however, we will use Alteryx instead.

Class Plan:

Teams: during this class, please sit in your discussion teams.

1. This will be the first of a two-part class examining transaction analytics. In this particular case we will examine links between credit card expenditures and various internal controls.
2. The class is heavily labs orientated with several ETL tasks to be performed which will largely be performed and then discussed in discussion groups with the warm call technique facilitating the full class discussion.