Every forensic accountant I know has watched the film The Accountant and wished for Christian Wolff’s super-human powers.
Played brilliantly by Ben Affleck, Christian Wolff is a fictional character who uses his extraordinary skills as an accountant to prepare tax returns and conduct financial investigations for legitimate clients, as well as to launder money for criminals. The story begins when he’s called in on a legitimate investigation.
The first time I saw the film, I groaned when I saw the conference room full of boxes holding 15 years of financial records that needed to be sorted through and analyzed. But commiseration quickly gave way to amazement and envy as I watched Christian manually process all the data, spot outliers, and identify the fraud patterns — in a 24-hour sprint. As one CPA told Forbes, “I wish I could be that efficient.”
But here’s the good news: Now you can.
AI has disrupted many industries, and fortunately it’s come to forensic accounting as well. Frustrated by the time-consuming, error-prone manual processes required just to prepare the data before it could even be analyzed, we at Sedra Global Consultancy decided to take matters into our own hands and build an AI-powered tool to do the work for us. That’s how Sedra Solutions was born.
From paper copies to PDFs and electronic records, the Sedra platform ingests bank statements, credit card bills, and all other types of financial records in a variety of formats and languages. Using AI, it ingests and standardizes the data with incredible speed and accuracy, so you can begin analysis in days instead of months.
But the advantages of AI don’t stop there. Our platform also flags outlier data and identifies patterns. Remember when Dana Cummings walks into the conference room in the morning and sees the red check marks next to all the outliers Christian has identified? The Sedra platform makes it just that easy, displaying the unusual transactions clearly on a dashboard. Even better, you can click those outliers to immediately drill down into the source records so you can investigate. Imagine if Christian could press on one of his red check marks on the whiteboard and the relevant files would fly out of the box and into his hands.
Unusual transactions for a party are displayed on a scatter plot. You can hover over a transaction to see its summary, or click it to view further details including the source data.
Of course, at this point the investigation still isn’t done. Dana and Christian still need to figure out the connections to trace the money flows between parties. Dana can easily recall information about the vendors, so they’re able to see the connections almost immediately, but few accountants have that sort of encyclopedic knowledge at the ready.
That’s where Sedra helps once again. The platform shows visual representations of the money flows and lets you select two parties to see the intermediaries between them.
Parties relations tracing. Select two parties to view the money flow including intermediary parties between them.
In the film, it was easy to see the case details when the data was all written on the walls — until the CEO told the janitor to erase everything. Furthermore, the data wasn’t portable. (You couldn’t exactly ask a jury to visit the conference room.) With the Sedra platform, however, there’s an immutable audit trail, so there’s no risk of a cover up. And it’s easy to generate reports that can be used to prove the case in the board room as well as the court room.
So the next time you’re faced with mountains of records and navigating dozens of spreadsheets, simply contact us for a demo. Once you’ve used the Sedra Solutions platform, you won’t envy Christian Wolff — you’ll wonder why he’s working so hard.