SAMPLE SELECTION TOOL

Automate your audit testing!

Audit sampling requires the auditor to define a population, determine the number of selections, and select individual items for testing. Our Sample Selection Tool will help you determine the sample size and will automatically select items for testing.

Ideally suited for SOX 404 and other internal control audits, it is flexible enough to accommodate most types of financial auditing. The user inputs the confidence interval and the acceptable margin of error (e.g. 95% confident that the margin of error is within 10%) and the Sample Selection Tool calculates the number of test selections for a given population.

Once the sample size has been calculated, with the push of a button, individual selections are made throughout the population. The user interface is Excel, with software behind the scenes to automate key functions. Test and document your audit work in the same Excel workbook.

For more detailed information see the Sample Selection Tool demo below. Please also see our FAQ for answers to frequently asked questions.

Contact us at sales@procognis.com if you have any questions about this product can help automate the audit sampling process.

Ordering Information

The Sample Selection Tool is available for $199 (US Dollars) for download.

SAMPLE SELECTION TOOL DEMO

You will create a new Sample Selection Tool workbook for each population you wish test. A population could be the transactions in a GL account or a warehouse full of fixed assets. You can describe the Control and the Test(s) in the provided fields. You can also keep track of the person responsible for the testing, the person responsible for reviewing the test results, the date completed, the last test date and the number years until the next test. This information is useful to manage the testing.

We also provide a drop down list box for testing status that allows you to see the current status at a glance. See the screen shot below for an example.

You will now enter the beginning and ending sequence numbers that define the population. These numbers are used to identify items to select for testing. The end sequence minus the beginning sequence number defines the size of the population and these two data points must be integers.

Once all of the testing information is collected and recorded, you can now decide on the sample size to use for the testing. We provide a sample size calculator based on a well established statistical model often used in Financial Audits and other fields (see the FAQ for more information).

The sample size calculator requires several inputs: the Margin of Error and a Confidence interval. The Margin of Error is a technical concept that primarily applies to numerical sampling but is essentially a rough indicator of how far off the conclusions drawn from the samples may be from reality. The Margin of Error is typically set at 10% but the allowable values vary between 1% and 20%. Setting a small percentage Margin of Error will result in very large sample sizes. This concept is roughly comparable to the risk scoring using the Significance and Likelihood metrics from the SOX 404 Tool.

The Confidence interval can be either 95% or 99% and is two-sided, meaning that one half of the outlying curve is on either side of the mean. The Confidence interval selects how much of the population may be considered useful to test and excludes the outlying possibilities. A 99% Confidence interval will create a larger sample size than a 95% confidence interval.

You can also override our calculated sample size by manually entering the sample size in the 'No. of Selections' field and leaving the 'Use Computed Sample Size' check box unchecked. When you enter the required information and you have decided how many samples to select, simply press the 'Create Sample' button and a table is created that allows you to enter information with the sequence numbers to select for testing. See the below screen shot for an example sample selection.

If you later decide to create a different sample size, you can press the 'Clear Sample' button and you will be asked to confirm your request. If you confirm the deletion, all of the sample rows will be deleted along with any stored data.

After testing is complete, you can use the 'Testing Status' drop down list box to select the appropriate status for this testing. There is also a worksheet for free-form user entry that can be used to record testing information and any sequence number mapping or similar details.

The features provided by the Sample Selection Tool makes testing and tracking the testing results manageable.