In this four-part series, I will introduce you to the risks and analysis options about the subject of “documents posted during weekend” in SAP systems. Without a doubt, documents posted during weekend are not unusual in many companies. But…
Part I of the series: “FI documents posted during weekend”
1. What postings during weekend have to do with the fraud triangle
2. How to identify postings during weekend
3. Postings during weekend you should definitely not ignore
4. Quick Guide: Reducing the identified amount of postings
… on the other hand, weekends offer a period in which one can work unobserved and unchallenged by other fellow colleagues. Whoever plans to be dishonest, will want to be undisturbed. Therefore, I will explain to you how to differentiate ordinary from unusual activity with the help of data analytics and thus explore audit analytics.
When nobody is watching…
Do you know the Fraud Triangle? The Fraud Triangle illustrates what favors fraud in the company. Three things must come together for a fraudster: Pressure, opportunity and rationalization. But what does that have to do with documents posted during weekend? It’s very simple: It offers the opportunity.
Now, everybody knows: In big companies, work is also carried out on weekends and postings are made. This is not unusual at first. Therefore, to consider documents posted during weekend alone leads to many ordinary and not particularly interesting business transactions. This raises the question: which other criteria should be considered besides the weekend? Nobody likes false positives.
After studying this series, you will be able to:
- Assess the risks of documents posted during weekend
- Identify documents posted during weekend in SAP and
- Furthermore, analyse features that lead to interesting postings during weekend.
Why are documents posted during weekend interesting?
Documents posted during weekend are especially interesting when the postings came from departments that are normally not working during weekends, like employees in the accounting or payment transactions department.
For this reason, it is first of all useful to find out which departments of your company usually work on weekends. Their postings during weekend tend to be less interesting. For example, one could imagine that employees in the logistics department and in warehouses are regularly working on weekends. Thus, you can expect to ultimately discover exotic or interesting business transactions that are not to be expected on weekends.
Does posting documents on weekend should be avoided?
Many phenomena that are investigated by auditors are at the same time weaknesses that one would like to prevent in the context of the internal control system. Of course, this is not the case when it comes to documents posted during weekends. Postings during weekends should be investigated ex-post.
How to identify postings during weekend?
You will find out how to identify postings during weekend in the data of your SAP system in the second part of this series. In case you cannot wait, I recommend the whitepaper about all cross process indicators, to which this indicator also belongs:
