The time frame selected for evaluation depends largely on the frequency of updates within the accounting information systems.
The objective of financial reporting is to provide information that is useful to management and stakeholders for resource allocation decisions.
CDA software can continuously and automatically monitor transactions, comparing their generic characteristics with predetermined benchmarks, thereby identifying anomalous situations.
This file can be viewed as an extension of the existing practice of documenting audit activities in manual or automated work papers.
A black box log file is a read-only, third-party controlled record of the actions of auditors.
The objective of black box logging is to protect a continuous auditing system against auditor and management manipulations.
They argue that near real-time information would provide them with the ability to take advantage of important business moves as they happen.
Additionally, some companies are fearful that continuously reported financial information would give away important strategic moves and undermine competitive advantage.
Knowing about these steps will enable auditors to better monitor the continuous audit process and provide recommendations for its improvement, if needed.
In addition, monitoring and audit rules must take into consideration legal and environmental issues, as well as the objectives of the particular process.
When defining a CAP, auditors should consider the costs and benefits of error detection as well as audit and management follow-up activities.
When informing auditees of continuous audit activity results, it is important for the exchange to be independent and consistent.
External disclosure, internal drivers, laws and regulation, and technology all play important roles in pushing up demand.
This increase improves the quality of earnings while reducing manager aggressiveness and decreasing stock market volatility.
[7][8] Laws and regulation require activities and ways a company followed in order to achieve a specific goal to be monitored.
XBRL facilitates the development of continuous auditing modules by providing a way for systems to understand the meaning of tagged data.
Proper use of XBRL assures that relevant data gathered from multiple sources is easily comparable and analyzable.
XBRL is a derivative of the XML file format, which tags data with contextual and hierarchical information.
It is expected that many enterprise resource planning systems will provide data in the XBRL-GL format to facilitate machine readability.
A benefit of continuous auditing is that it performs routine, repetitive tasks and provides the opportunity for the more interesting exploratory work that adds far more value to the organization.