The solutions leverage the power of data to help clients thrive with forward-looking strategic business insights and enable chief financial officers (CFOs) and companies’ management to make more fact-based decisions with greater confidence.

• EY SAAM

EY Smart Accounting and Analytics Module (EY SAAM) is one of the recent product innovations out of our financial accounting advisory services (FAAS) AI Lab. It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate an end-to-end processing of invoices. The process involves extraction of invoices. It assesses the accounting treatment, generates journal entries and then renders an anomaly detection.

The following are the steps that facilitate the extraction of invoices:

–   The process begins with receiving and ingesting invoices and allows extraction of relevant data.
–   An algorithm helps in classifying the expense items.
–   Machine Learning helps in predicting the correct journal entries.
–   Users review, validate and remove items for manual processing and sign off. 

The journal entry information is ingested into the ERP system as per users’ discretion. EY SAAM can process large volumes of invoices — human accountants process between 17-30,000 invoices per year whereas SAAM processes 15,000 per day or 5.5 million per year. EY SAAM has the precision rates of more than 95%. Further, it constantly learns and improves its accuracy over time.

• Alteryx

Alteryx is an EY Partner tool for blending, cleansing and processing of data. It has the ability to import/download/upload data from multiple sources at the same time. It allows users to set up repeatable data processing steps by minimizing their efforts to update the workflow in case of a change in process.

This tool is a simpler alternative to RPA for excel task automation. It provides self-service data analytics, with the ability to process large volumes of data without writing complex code. It can import data from almost all data sources, including, xls, csv, txt and SQL server.

• Data visualization

Data visualization is the representation of large amounts of data in a visual form to bring out hidden meanings, trends, patterns and data clusters. It allows quicker insights to take advantage of business opportunities through multi-dimension analysis, drill down abilities to the lowest level of detail and story boarding.

The solution enables the articulation of the story behind the data by developing interactive, meaningful visualizations and analytic reports. It helps communicate complex concepts via simple visuals, which are also easy to refresh and manage repetitive reporting tasks. EY focuses primarily on partner tools such as Power BI and Spotfire for data visualization.