A Comprehensive Introduction to ACL™ Analytics – ACL101

Description

This three-day ACL Certified course comprehensively introduces new and beginner users everything they need to know to start being productive with ACL Analytics. In an interactive, hands-on environment, your instructor, who has many years of ACL and audit experience, will start by teaching you the necessary fundamentals in less than half a day. The course will then build on the fundamentals and guide you through the typical data analytic phases of importing data, preparing data, analyzing data and reporting your results. On the third day, basic scripting will be introduced to demonstrate how easy it is to automate analytic routines with ACL Analytics.

Throughout this comprehensive introduction and practical application via instructor-led sessions and activities, you will learn how to effectively use ACL Analytics to accomplish your audit and/or business objectives. Your experienced ACL instructor will encourage an interactive environment where you can ask for assistance, advice and guidance.

This course will also prepare you for level 4 of the ACL Certified Data Analyst (ACDA) exam.

What you will learn

This course provides the fundamentals, covers the data analytic phases of importing data, preparing data, analyzing data and reporting results. It also covers basic scripting showing how to automate analytic routines with ACL Analytics. This course will also prepare you for level 4 of the ACL Certified Data Analyst (ACDA) exam.

Objectives

Basics:

• Data concepts
• ACL Analytics – environment and user interface
• Best practices
• Phases of data analysis
• Expressions:
• Expression overview
• Filters
• Word searches
• Computed fields–unconditional and conditional
• Function overview

Importing Data:

• Locating and acquiring data
• Importing fixed width files
• Importing delimited files
• Importing excel files
• Importing print image report files
• Importing pdf files
• Importing via ODBC
• Re-using prior import statements

Preparing Data:

• Understanding integrity
• Testing for validity (corrupt data and correct field definitions)
• Testing for controls
• Testing for date and character bounds
• Testing for quality and completeness
• Testing for missing items
• Testing for duplicates
• Testing for reasonableness
• Testing for calculation errors

Analyzing Data:

• Grouping data (identifying category totals and trends)
• Reordering (sorting) records
• Isolating data (creating data file sub-sets to improve efficiency and track results)
• Combining data (stacking common files on top of each other and linking files on one or more common key fields)

Reporting:

• Creating documentation reports for working papers
• Printing reports
• Exporting to other file types, such as Excel
• How to access ACL’s GRC results lite module where exceptions can be tracked, distributed and monitored
• Visualizing results in graphs

Scripts:

• Introduction to automating analytic routines with scripts
• Working with variables to allow scripts to run against future data
• Scripting interactions that prompt for user input when a script is run