This series of four short assignments was developed to walk students through examples of how an accounting professional might approach potential risk assessment scenarios for a set of transactions. These assignments will utilize students’ existing foundational Alteryx and Microsoft Power BI skills to query and visualize data to support data analysis and risk assessment over various data points. These assignments are independent of each other, allowing faculty the flexibility to choose which assignment(s) to use in class.

Assignment 1: Students will take the role of an audit associate to analyze sales volume utilizing Alteryx. Starting with the prior year workflow used analyze sales volume as a risk assessment procedure, students will identify and make necessary changes to the workflow for the current year and refine the workflow in multiple ways to build a more precise analysis.

Assignment 2: Students will take the role of an audit associate to assess risks for revenue utilizing Microsoft Power BI. In this assignment, the student will build visualizations to show sales volumes and dollars of products by store, identify trends, assess the risk of store/product combinations, and develop follow up questions for management.

Assignment 3: Students will take the role of a Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) associate to analyze purchase price variance utilizing Alteryx. The student will build an Alteryx workflow to calculate the purchase price variance (PPV) of all products, analyze and answer questions regarding the calculated PPV population, and identify risks of not regularly updating standard costs.

Assignment 4: Students will take the role of a FP&A associate to assess risks for inventory utilizing Microsoft Power BI. In this assignment, the student will build visualizations for the company’s inventory, including the purchase price variance (PPV). Using these visualizations, students will analyze the inventory and answer questions regarding observations of the population, as well as answer questions regarding the risk profile and next steps from a managerial perspective.

Learning objectives

1.       Review and modify existing Alteryx workflows to apply changes applicable to the current period.
2.       Construct Alteryx workflows and analyze results to identify patterns, especially those that could be indicative of higher or lower risk criteria.
3.       Re-work Alteryx workflows to observe other possible outcomes when applying different criteria.
4.       Identify relevant next steps and/or questions to ask management to better understand a set of transactions.
5.       Construct Power BI visualizations to identify patterns in data and to aid in understanding a population of transactions.
6.       Use Power BI visualizations to draw effective insights related to the data.
7.       Understand the downstream impacts of a company’s accounting processes and identify opportunities for improvements to accounting processes for more accurate reporting.