Thomson Reuters offers new audit management tool

Thomson Reuters has added an Audit Management solution to its Connected Risk platform to help firms better assess risks and increase the efficiency of their audit process.

Thomson Reuters launched its Connected Risk platform in the first quarter of 2017 following its acquisition of Empowered Systems, whose proprietary technology underpins the offering. Connected Risk is designed to help customers tailor solutions to meet specific risk-use cases.

The new Audit Management addition is designed to facilitate the role of an audit advisor to their business clients by providing information to support strategic decision-making.

Auditors can use the tool to adjust audit plans in cycle to reflect changes in risk profiles, and where applicable, assessments can be informed by the broader business risk through use of the underlying Connected Risk platform’s data mapping and aggregation capabilities, according to Thomson Reuters. Audit professionals can also execute audits underpinned by electronic work-papers and subsequent audit findings management, which is all tracked and reported through the integrated dashboards and reporting engine and/or integrated into existing business intelligence tools.

“There is no denying that both the financial services and corporate sectors continue to experience unprecedented volumes of regulatory change and complexity,” said Gareth Evans, managing director, enterprise risk management at Thomson Reuters, in a statement. “The amount of data our customers must understand shows no sign of abatement. What they need more than ever are ways to better make sense of what matters.”

He added that the Audit Management tool will allow auditor customers to apply “the deep expertise that Thomson Reuters is known for in managing and interpreting unstructured data.”

Source: Accounting Today

Excel is about to get smarter

Microsoft Office 2019, set for release by the end of the year, will feature a more powerful Excel that will use artificial intelligence to perform more complex data analysis.

The souped up Excel will be able to understand more about a user’s inputs, and pull information from the internet as needed, TechCrunch reported. For example, users can tag a list as a certain category — such as “company names” — and Excel can get more information about the companies named in that list from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which will be connected with the spreadsheet. Excel will also be able to discern what category a list might fall under by reading the content of the list.

Also new will be a built-in tool that can create visual representations of the data within an Excel spreadsheet. Dubbed Insights, it is modeled after a similar tool in Microsoft’s Power BI suite. The charts and graphs are manipulable by the user as well.

“Office 2019 will add new user and IT capabilities for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud,” said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s general manager for Office, in a blog post. “For example, new and improved inking features—like pressure sensitivity, tilt effects, and ink replay—will allow you to work more naturally. New formulas and charts will make data analysis for Excel more powerful ... Cloud-powered innovation is a major theme at Ignite this week. But we recognize that moving to the cloud is a journey with many considerations along the way. Office 2019 will be a valuable upgrade for customers who feel that they need to keep some or all of their apps and servers on-premises, and we look forward to sharing more details about the release in the coming months."

Source: Accounting Today