Bank Statements, An Underutilized Asset

"Bank Statements are a gold mine for financial evidence" - Greg Hayes, Federal Equity Receiver

When audits go sideways and the Forensic Accountants, Trustees, and Receivers are called in, techniques like random sampling and confirmations are not enough.  To get comfortable with client data in a distressed situation, professionals often resort to recreating the books from evidence. In these high stakes scenarios, tens of thousands of dollars are paid to low skilled labor to manually transcribe data from bank statements. Some thought leading firms may invest in OCR software in an attempt to reduce hourly costs. However, it is well known that OCR is imperfect and work hours simply shift to error correction and statement reconciliation.

Valid8 provides solutions that recognize and extract financial evidence from documents to eliminate these shortcomings and provide 100% accurate (every statement reconciled to the penny) transaction databases. The only required work is uploading PDF statements.

These transaction databases created directly from evidence are extremely valuable in distressed situations, but if an auditor could have access to the same data without adding any additional time to an audit engagement, they could use the massive increase in evidence to increase audit quality. Software, and the productivity advantages it brings, provides the opportunity for auditors to employ forensic level scrutiny for any client engagement.