Basic Principles of Financial Process Mining A Journey through Financial Data in Accounting Information Systems

Auditors and process managers often face a huge amount of financial entries in accounting information systems. For many reasons like auditing the internal control system a process-oriented view would be more helpful to understand how a set of transactions produced financial entries. For this reason we present an algorithm capable to mine financial entries and open items to reconstruct the process instances which produced the financial entries. In this way, auditors can trace how balance sheet items have been produced in the system. Traditional process mining techniques only reconstruct processes but pay no regard to the financial dimension. The paper wants to close this gap and integrate the process view with the accounting view.