New Approach to Creating a Closing Book or Audit Bundle
Most accountants have created what amounts to what I refer to as a "closing book". For a smaller financial statement, that closing book might be only one or maybe a handful of electronic spreadsheets. For a larger closing book, such as that of a Fortune 1000 company, as Gartner consultancy points out , it might be more than 800 electronic spreadsheets. And those spreadsheets have mistakes. Consider the fact that 94% of business operational spreadsheets are known to have critical errors . This includes the spreadsheets in that closing book. Now, PWC says that they have been able to get artificial intelligence to accurately read electronic spreadsheets about 74% of the time with hopes that they can get accuracy up to about maybe 87%. And because an accuracy rate of 87% is not sufficient for a compliance report; humans are going to close the gap between the perhaps 87% accuracy rate and the theoretical goal of 100% accuracy. While this is maybe a viable approach; is this the o...