Purchase Order “Analytic Audit”

This paper reviews a case study used as part of introducing data and analytics in a Masters of Accounting curriculum. In particular, this paper presents a dataset, an approach to analyzing that data using analytic approaches, suggests that analysis of that dataset could function as a capstone project, and provides a review of multiple data, analytical tools, and methodologies. The dataset includes almost 13,500 purchase orders and allows the use of multiple data analytic approaches for anomaly detection, time-series analysis, and visualization to meet audit goals such as identification of unusual or significant items, determination of trends, and concentration of purchasing activity.