Out of Balance Entries

The Out of Balance Entries analytic test generates a list of journal entries where the total amount for each journal entry does not equal zero.

This analytic test can be used to identify:

  • Possible attempts to manipulate the financial statements

  • Lower accuracy and precision of financial reporting areas

  • Systemic issues in how a department processes transactions

  • System settings that are not properly configured

  • Failure of the data validation process

  • Weak internal controls

  • Weak monitoring and detecting activities

  • Poor training

  • Accounts that have not been reconciled on a timely basis or contain unreconciled differences

  • One-sided transactions

Fields used for analysis

The following fields are used for this analysis:

  • A field that contains a unique transaction ID such as the Entry ID field in the general ledger dataset. This field is used to determine the transaction balance and assess whether it is in or out of balance. For double entry transactions, you must select the field to use as the unique identifier. This is the Grouping field parameter.

  • The field that contains the amount for the transaction line. Note that positive values are considered debit transactions and negative values are considered credit transactions.

Parameters

There is one parameter that must be set in order to run this test:

Grouping field - Select the field to use as the unique identifier for double entry transactions, such as the Entry ID or Entry number field. By default, the Entry number field is used for this parameter.

Technical specifications

When you run the Rounded Amounts analytic test, the following steps are performed to run the test:

  1. Summarize the amount for each unique transaction identifier.

  2. Extract all items for which the summarized total is non-zero.

  3. Join back the non-zero amounts to the original file using the unique identifier for the transaction and export it as the test result.

  4. Extract the result fields selected by the user. All fields are extracted by default.

    Note: The ability to select result fields is not currently available and will be included in a later release.