Caseware IDEA Training Course

Objective:
IDEA is a computer-based file interrogation tool designed for use by auditors, accountants, investigators, and IT staff. It analyzes data in many ways and allows extraction, sampling, and manipulation of data in order to identify errors, problems, specific issues, and trends.

Benefits of increased use of Data Analytics in Audit are:

• Improved understanding of an entity’s operations and associated risks, including the risk of fraud.
• Increased potential for detecting material misstatements.
• Improved communications with those charged with governance of audited entities.

Following the training a user of IDEA can perform the following tasks:

• Compares, joins, appends, and connects different files from different sources.
• Extracts specific transactions, identifies gaps (for example, in a check number sequence), or duplicates.
• Profiles data by summarizing, stratifying, or aging the files
• Creates useful file statistics automatically.
• Creates charts and graphs from data.
• Creates samples using several different sampling methods.

That will enable auditors using IDEA to:

• Increase or widen scope of investigations, such as conducting tests which cannot be done manually
• Increase coverage (checking a large number of items and potentially covering 100 percent of the transactions for a year or more)
• Have better information, such as extra analysis or profiling of data
• Save time