Get Your Ducks in a Row: Unlocking the Power of Audit Reports for Business Success

The Critical Role of Audit Reports in Data Validation

In today’s data-driven world, everything starts with good data but how do you ensure that amidst all the calculation building and data manipulation that your data is still accurate?
Audit reports are essential for validating your data, allowing you to quickly identify any gaps at a glance. Their primary advantage is their ease of creation and full customizability, enabling you to monitor any aspect of your data. While they can be used at any point in your data stream, they are particularly effective at the beginning, to ensure the data flowing into your model is valid. This reduces troubleshooting time, as you can quickly determine whether an issue is data-related or likely logic-related. Additionally, you can set up various data checkpoints within your model to further narrow down potential areas of concern during the build process.

Common Use Cases for Audit Reports

Employee Checks

A common use of audit reports is to ensure that all data related to employees is complete and accurate. Key areas to check include:

• Missing payee identifiers
• Unassigned compensation plans
• Missing quotas
• Missing target incentives
• Unassigned manager / payee relationships or team assignments
• Appropriate component weightings

Transaction Details Verification

Similarly, audit reports can further validate data completeness through transaction checks. These checks include:

• Unassigned transactions to a representative or team
• Unassigned status types
• Missing key values such as dates, amounts, rates, etc.
• Improper formatting, such as incorrect date formats

Data Imports from Multiple Sources

Another common scenario for using audit reports is when importing data from multiple sources. Each source may format the same elements differently, increasing the risk of data inconsistency. Multiple sources also add complexity to the data integration process, requiring careful data mapping and transformation. Without this, issues like incomplete data, formatting errors, missing values, or duplicate records can arise. Data validation is essential to maintaining accurate and usable data, and audit reports provide a quick and easy solution for this.

Identifying Outliers

In addition to data completeness, you can use audit reports to determine data accuracy and reliability. This is particularly useful if your data undergoes various transformations to get it into a usable format. For example, it is very common to set up data reliability audit reports that highlight individuals with unusual activity. For example, flagging payees with unusually high / low payouts, target incentives, or attainment, among other criteria. With the right set up and configuration, you would be able to use audit reports as an indicator of logic issues as well as data issues.

Summary

One of the hardest parts of working with data is not only cleaning it, but keeping it clean amidst all the transformations it has to go through. Data validation can be a long and tedious process but it doesn’t always have to be. Audit reports can be quick and easy to build as well as implement into your model. With a few audit reports at key places in your process, such as when doing employee checks or at points where you have data coming in from multiple sources, you will be able to identify inconsistencies in your data at a glance.

Next Steps

Discover how easy data validation can be! Contact us today and find out how we can help you create your own audit reports.