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AI -- it's not SCI FI anymore

 While you might think of accountants as primarily rule followers, our services go way beyond that limited perspective.  Much of what we do involves inquiry. 

In fact, much of our job is looking for data abnormalities, from coding errors to process circumvention, we spend a good bit of time reviewing patterns, trends, and operating processes. We are always on the lookout for risk that may adversely impact a business. Sometimes risk might be in the form of fraud, but more often, it might be the result of limited training, or undocumented procedures, or failure to communicate in a way that line workers can understand.  

In the early days of audit work, accountants would be charged with identifying risks across large volumes of data.  Since they had limited resources, they resorted to data sampling as a way of identifying the highest risk transactions in a set of financial data.  Thanks to the benefits of advanced applications like MindBridge and other analytical tools, we are able to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to review large volumes of data in search of any abnormalities that might indicate a higher level of risk. 

IBM defines artificial intelligence as, "At its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving. It also encompasses sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning, which are frequently mentioned in conjunction with artificial intelligence. These disciplines are comprised of AI algorithms which seek to create expert systems which make predictions or classifications based on input data."  (https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/what-is-artificial-intelligence)

In our world, AI allows us to review 100% of the transactional data underlying the financial results of a business. 

The tool we use allows us to review the following: 

  • Business rules: Suspicious Keywords, Sequence Gaps, Duplicates, Reversals, Cash expenditures
  • Statistical models: High Monetary Value, Benford’s Law, Unusual Amount
  • Machine learning: Rare Flow, Outlier Anomaly, Expert Score, Flow Analysis

At the conclusion of our analysis, we are able to provide our customers a risk rating across their business. 

For the team at BDCO, this is just one more way we try to deliver peace of mind to our customers in the wine industry.