Purchase Order “Analytic Audit”

This paper reviews a case study used as part of introducing data and analytics in a Masters of Accounting curriculum. In particular, this paper presents a data set, an approach to analyzing that data using analytic approaches and suggests that analysis of that data set could function as a capstone project, providing a review over multiple data and analytical tools and methodologies. The data set includes almost 50,000 purchase orders and allows the use of multiple data analytic approaches for anomaly detection, time series analysis and visualization to meet audit goals such as identification of unusual or significant items, determination of trends and concentration of purchasing activity.