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Basic Principles of Financial Process Mining A

Journey through Financial Data in Accounting
Information Systems
Nick Gehrke
University of Hamburg, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation
Gehrke, Nick, "Basic Principles of Financial Process Mining A Journey through Financial Data in Accounting Information Systems"
(2010). AMCIS 2010 Proceedings. 289.
http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2010/289

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

Basic Principles of Financial Process Mining

A Journey through Financial Data in Accounting Information Systems

Nick Gehrke Niels Mueller-Wickop

University of Hamburg University of Hamburg
[email protected] [email protected]

ABSTRACT
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.
Keywords
Financial Process Mining, Business Processes, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, Financial Data, IT Audit, System
Audit, Process Audit, Process Performance Improvement

INTRODUCTION
The modeling of Business Processes is a broad and well-known area of research in the field of information systems. Several
business process modeling languages like Event Driven Process Chains (EPC) (Scheer and Nüttgens, 1995; Scheer and
Nüttgens, 2000) or the Business Process Modeling Language (BPMN; (BPMN, 2004)) have evolved in recent years inspired
by researchers and practitioners. With the aid of business process modeling languages, business processes are visualized for
better understanding processes or for analysis and improvement purposes. Usually, business process modeling languages
provide a set of elements as abstractions of real-world objects and allow users modeling processes which were evaluated
manually before. In this paper, we want to propose an approach how financial business processes can be evaluated based on
entries in the accounting module of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. We use open item accounting in the ERP
system to link documents and items and to reconstruct the financial business processes. Processes are automatically “mined”
based on existing financial data in the database of an ERP system. As a result, the manual modeling of these processes
becomes obsolete to save time and improve accuracy of the visualization and the evaluation of properties of existing financial
business processes. With our approach, we address two main groups of users: auditors who analyze processes for compliance
reasons (internal as well as external auditors) and process managers who are interested in performance aspects of business
processes.

The paper on hand has one aim: it can be understood as a feasibility study to show that our approach to automatically mining
financial business process instances works in a real-world ERP system environment. We have chosen SAP as a well known
and widely used ERP system and have implement a basic mining algorithm in the Java programming language to mine and
visualize individual process instances. As a proof of concept, we provide some exemplary processes which have been mined
with our algorithm.

The paper is organized as follows: we first explain the stakeholders being potentially interested in financial process mining.
After that related work is discussed and the research gap is revealed. The basic principle and our prototypical implementation
are shown in the next section.

STAKEHOLDERS OF FINANCIAL PROCESS MINING

The main stakeholders include business process managers / process owners, external and internal auditors and risk managers
but are not limited to those. Several of these stakeholders and their interest are outlined below.

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

In some cases there is no clear differentiation between the tasks of the different stakeholders, the boundaries are rather fluid.
For that reason the most obvious beneficiary will be presented first, followed by the less obvious.

(External) Auditors: Public accountants are required to follow the International Standards on Auditing (ISA) or at least the
local Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). ISA 315 states that “The auditor should obtain an understanding of
the information system, including the related business processes, relevant to financial reporting (…)” ISA 315.81 (IFAC,
2008-I). Equally important in this context is the so-called materiality (for a definition see ISA 320.3 (IFAC, 2008-I)). Since
only processes could be of interest having processed an amount above a predefined materiality limit it is essential to link the
process dimension with the financial dimension e.g. the amount that has been posted to financial accounts by the process. In
addition “when the auditor intends to use information about the entity and its environment obtained in prior periods, the
auditor should determine whether changes have occurred that may affect the relevance of such information in the current
audit” ISA 315.12 (IFAC, 2008-I). For the audit of the Internal Control System this means that processes need to be checked
each year. For that reason time-consuming and error-prone face-to-face interviews are carried out. These interviews could be
avoided or reduced to a certain extent if automated approaches like financial process mining are used. For the highly
recognized Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 Section 404 reflects the requirements of ISA 315.12 (Public Law 107-204-JULY 30,
2002). Furthermore according to ISA 240 the auditor has extensive responsibilities regarding risks of material misstatement
due to fraud (IFAC, 2008-II). So-called fraud scans could be simplified by using financial process mining.

Internal Auditors: Together with the external auditors, internal auditors have their local legislation as well as international
standards. These international standards are set by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) (Richards, Oliphant and Le Grand,
2005; Coderre, 2005; Juergens, 2006; Rehage, Hunt and Nikitin, 2008; Wegrzynowicz and Stein, 2009; Askelson, Lanza,
Millar, Prosch and Sparks, 2009). Generally speaking, the IIA requirements result in the same challenges as those described
for the external auditors. As an example for local GAAP again the Oxley Act of 2002 Section 404 can be quoted. Beyond the
requirements already mentioned the internal auditor is interested in some more possible applications of financial process
mining e.g. Critical Paths Analyses or performance issues.

Business Process Managers / Process Owners: It is essential for this group of stakeholders to create and define processes
on a high level but also to verify, predict and optimize the actual implementation. For a lot of processes this can be done by
the mining techniques already implemented (described in the section “related work”). For all three aspects – verification,
prediction and optimization - a fast and easy way of analysis as well as graphical presentation is necessary. The prediction of
processing times of financial process is of great interest for discounts as well as for fines. Besides, processing times are
applicable to the optimization of financial processes. In the case of an optimization an iterative approach could be of great
interest. This approach requires several cycles of process mapping and graphical presentation. For financial processes the
existing tools are not adequate since they ignore the financial dimension. Only with the financial dimension can the process
owner be sure about the values which pass through certain processes and therefore about the importance of these processes.

Risk Managers: Beside some legal requirements and de facto standards like the COSO Framework (COSO, 2004), which
are fundamentally analogous with those of (internal) Auditors, a risk manager could use financial process mining for
Bottleneck analyses, critical path analyses and single point of failure analyses.

RELATED WORK AND MOTIVATION

By now, process mining as a whole is a fairly well researched field of science. First research was done in 1995 by Cook and
Wolf for the software engineering process (Cook and Wolf, 1995). In 1998 process mining was first adapted to Workflow
Systems by Agrawal and Gunopulos (Agrawal, Gunopulos and Leymann, 1998). A full overview until 2002 is given in (Van
der Aalst, van Dongen, Herbst, Maruster, Schimm and Weijters, 2002) by W.M.P. van der Aalst et al.. Till now most of the
process mining techniques are developed for workflow systems.

For financial process mining all the workflow management based process mining techniques are of minor interest. Our main
focus is on Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) or Accounting information systems (AIS) managing the accounting,
such as Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP ERP. Some research related to process mining and ERP Systems was accomplished
in the past (Ramesh, 2006; Van Giessel, 2004). But none of them uses open items to mine the financial business processes.

We would like to emphasize that traditional work in the field of process mining completely omits issues related to materiality
and financial entries. From an auditor’s perspective regarding process flows only does not take into consideration the rear
side of the medal: materiality and risk assessment of processes. Materiality and risk assessment can only be done by
considering the amounts and accounts used by transactions. Otherwise auditors are deaf in one ear. With our work we want to

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

close this important gap and develop automated approaches and methods for auditors and other stakeholders to improve
quality and reduce hours of work.

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF FINANCIAL PROCESS MINING

Structure of Accounting Data in IT Systems
Basically, entries in the accounting of an IT-system are structured in a simple way (Romney and Steinbart, 2008). Each entry
consists of an accounting document and at least two items posted as credits and debits. If open item accounting is in use for a
particular account, each item contains a flag whether indicating the item has already been cleared or not. If an item has been
cleared, it also contains a reference to the entry / document which cleared the item.

Figure 1: Generalized and simplified data structure of a financial entry using open item accounting

Figure 1 depicts the general data structure of an entry in a database. One document consists of two or more items posted on
different accounts. Each item can be linked to one (other) document (=item cleared) or does not refer to (another) document
(=item still open). As an example, an outgoing payment might clear an open invoice of a vendor. According to this
generalized data structure entries are linked by clearing document references and can result in comprehensive “networks”
consisting of documents and items.
Concept of the Basic Mining Algorithm
Accounting Documents as a Graph
Based on the generalized structure of financial entries one can define a financial business process as a directed graph with
two kinds of nodes: documents and items. We define such a financial business process graph as a graph having the following
properties:

According to the nodes in the graph:

1 Two types of nodes exist: Documents and Items
2 Nodes of the type “Document” have at least the following properties but are not limited to them: DocumentNo
(=unique identifier of the document)
3 Nodes of the type “Item” have at least but are not limited to the following properties: DocumentNo and PositionNo
(=combined unique identifier of the item), Amount (=Amount of the Item), Account (=Account number where the
item has been posted to), CreditOrDebitIndicator (=Indicates if the item has been credited or debited on the account)

According to the edges in the graph:

4 Directed edges from a node of type “Document” to a node of type “Item” means that the document consists of the
item. In general, a document must have edges to at least two item nodes (at least one credit and one debit item).
5 Directed edges from a node of type “Item” to a node of type “Document” means that the item has been cleared by
the document node. An item can have only one edge to a document. If an item has no edge to a document this means
that it has not been cleared so far or the account where the item has been posted to is not using open item
accounting.

The Algorithm
As already explained, we implemented a prototypical algorithm to reveal a “network” of interrelated documents and items
which are considered to be an individual financial business process instance. Since the algorithm has been developed in an
object-oriented style we at first explain the most important classes needed to mine through financial entries.

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

1 DocumentContainer
-Documents
+AddDocument() * *
+GetDocument()

* Item
-DocumentNo
-PositionNo
Document
-Amount
-DocumentNo -Account
-Items -CreditOrDebitIndicator
1
-Container -ClearingDoc
-ClearedItems +RetrieveClearingDocument()
+StepAhead() 1
+LoadDoc()
+RetrieveClearedItems()

Figure 2: Classes used to mine financial business processes

Figure 2 depicts the classes needed for the mining process. The class Document encapsulates a document in the database as
shown in figure 1. The class Item encapsulates an item in the database. The class DocumentContainer is a collection of
documents. Whenever a document is found by the mining algorithm within a graph of documents and items, it is put in the
DocumentContainer. When the mining algorithm has finished and found all documents in a graph, the DocumentContainer
contains a complete graph of documents and items. The methods indicated in figure 2 can be explained as follows:
Item.RetrieveClearingDocuments(): Retrieves the clearing document of the item from the database.
Document.LoadDoc(DocNo): Retrieves the data of a document with document number DocNo from the database. Also
retrieves all the items of the document and stores these items in the collection Items.
Document.RetrieveClearedItems(): Retrieves the items which have been cleared by the document.
DocumentContainer.AddDocument(): Adds a Document to the DocumentContainer.
Document.StepAhead(): This method is the algorithm doing the mining of the graph. It starts with the document calling the
method StepAhead() and then jumps to interrelated documents and items. It implements the “tree-traversal” needed to mine
the complete graph.
Since the method Document.StepAhead() contains the core algorithm for the financial business process mining we want to
explain it using pseudo source code in Java style.
The method StepAhead() is called by an arbitrary document which is an arbitrary node in a graph of documents and items.
The method starts traversing the documents and associated items in the graph. For this reason, the algorithm first “steps
forward” by calling the method StepAhead() again for all clearing documents which cleared the items belonging to the
starting document. In a second step the algorithm “steps back” and retrieves the items which have been cleared by the
document. For the cleared items found, the associated documents are retrieved and for these associated documents
StepAhead() is called again. The algorithms stops if no new documents are found in the graph. All the documents found in
this process are stored in a DocumentContainer which contains the set of documents being the result of the traversal process.
By stepping forwards and backwards in the graph all the documents and items belonging to these documents are finally found
and put in the DocumentContainer object. It is possible that documents are evaluated more than once when applying the
algorithm on a graph. In order to avoid infinite cycles leading to non-termination of the algorithm, all documents evaluated
once are put on a watch list. If the algorithm starts to evaluate a document a second time, this will be noticed by the watch list
and the evaluation of this document terminates while the algorithm starts evaluating the next document (leaping of already
evaluated documents).
Implementation of the Algorithm
As already mentioned, we implemented the described algorithm in the Java programming language. We use the SAP ERP
system to apply our algorithm to real-world accounting data. The accounting data used origins from a SAP IDES installation
which is featured with training data from SAP. In order to access SAP, the SAP proprietary Remote Function Call (RFC)
(Deimel, 1998) mechanism is used. Remote Function Calls allow to call programs within an SAP system by a remote client
program. To get accounting data the Function RFC_READ_TABLE is called by our algorithm. In order to use the Remote
Function Call mechanism the SAP JCo Application Programming Interface (API) (Yang, Su, Wu and Liu, 2008) for Java is
used in our implementation. Our Java algorithm produces a file containing the graph structure of the process instance. We
apply the Graph Modelling Language (GML) (Himsolt, 1997) for this purpose which is a hierarchical ASCII-based file
format. For the visualization of the process graph an arbitrary program capable of reading GML files can be used. For our
prototypical implementation the free program yEd (yWorks, 2010) has been chosen. yEd is capable to visualizing the GML
process graph in a simple and quick manner. Furthermore, yEd has a feature to apply automatic layouts to a range of different
diagrams and networks. As a result, our algorithm does not need to calculate coordinates and alignments for objects to be
visualized. Figure 3 shows the relevant components of our prototypical implementation of the mining algorithm.

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

Figure 3: Relevant components for the implementation of the algorithm

Information Visualization and Examples

In order to mine the structure of a process graph the algorithm needs the unique identifier of only one document. Starting
with this document, the algorithm starts crawling through documents and items and finally reveals the complete process
instance. It was one of our goals to visualize the financial process as best as possible. We also wanted to integrate two
dimensions in the visualization: activities and accounts. Activities are normally addressed by business process modeling
languages, but the financial accounts are often not addressed. Table 1 shows the legend we used to visualize financial process
instances related to both the flow of activities and accounts.

Represents a business activity. The label of the activity is the transaction or sub-program used in the
ERP System to post an entry to the ledger.
Box with border: Represents a cleared item of a financial entry. The three labels mean:
“001”: Number of the item in the accounting document
“160000”: Account number the item has been posted to
“5038.46”: Amount of the item
Box without border: Represents an open item of a financial entry that has not been cleared so far.
At this stage, this business process is not finished since a clearing is still needed.
Hexagon: Represents an item of a financial entry that is neither cleared nor uncleared because the
financial account used is not involved in open item accounting.
Represents a head of an accounting document. An accounting document groups the business activity
and the items posted by the business activity. The three labels mean:
“MG”: Person or user which conducted the business activity and thus did the ledger entry.
“KZ”: Document type (KZ here means “Payment of a Vendor”)
“Number”: Document number
Blue: The item has been posted to a balance sheet account on the asset side. This means an additional
asset has been posted or a liability has been compensated.
Yellow: The item has been posted to a balance sheet account on the liability side. This means an
Color of the Items
additional liability has been posted or an asset has been compensated.
Green: The item is an income posting (Profit & Loss is affected).
Red: The item is an expense entry (Profit & Loss is affected).

An edge from a business activity to an item means that the business activity has produced the item as
a part of the complete entry.

An edge from an item to a business activity means that the item has been cleared by the accounting
document produced by the business activity.

Table 1: Symbols used to visualize financial processes mined with the algorithm

In order to demonstrate that our algorithm works we show some exemplary mined financial processes and explain what these
processes have processed and how they can be interpreted from an auditor’s perspective. We start with some simple examples
but also show more complex processes. The graphs showing the processes only contain a baseline of information (like title of
business activity, account number, amounts etc.). It would be easy to include more information like date and time of entries
in order to analyze performance aspects. Figure 4 depicts a simple purchasing process.

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

Business Activities:
F110: Parameters for Automatic Payment (Payment run)
FB01: Post Document

Accounts:
160000 Trade Payables - domestic
154000 Input tax
113101 Deutsche Bank - checks payable
230051 Gain/loss Euro conversion / document difference
470400 IS-RE Apportionable operating costs

Document Types:
KR: Vendor Invoice, ZP: Payment
Figure 4: A simple purchasing process instance

The process instances above can be interpreted as follows: user “Eisenmann” posted a document (FB01) (here: invoice) to the
accounts payables and after that user “Olbert” did the payment run (F110) and cleared the accounts payable item. Since there
is a red item, the costs have been directly posted to the P&L and not to the inventory. The process is not complete. An open
item on account 113101 still exists since the item has no borders indicating an uncleared item. From an auditor’s perspective
this process might be a little unusual since the business activity “Post Document” is very generic and allows the posting of
almost arbitrary documents to arbitrary accounts. The process would be more integrated if a more specific business activity
would be used allowing the posting of invoices only and thus restricting possible postings due to a specific purpose.

Business Activities: Business Activities:

FBZ1: Post Incoming Payments MIRO Enter Incoming Invoice
VF01: Create Billing Document FBZ4 Payment with Printout

Accounts: Accounts:
800000 Sales revenues - domestic - finished goods 160000 Trade Payables - domestic
140000 Trade Receivables - domestic 154000 Input tax
113109 Deutsche Bank - customer payments 113120 Deutsche Bank - checks payable with checkmanagemt
276000 Discount received
Document Types: 191100 Goods Rcvd/Invoice Rcvd (third party)
DZ: Payment of a customer, RV: Billing Document Transfer
Document Types:
KZ: Vendor Payment, RE: Invoice Receipt
Figure 5: A sales process instance (left) and a purchasing process instance (right)

The process instances in Figures 5 show a simple sales process instance (left) and a purchasing process instance. In the
process instance on the left user “Maassberg” first posts a billing document (VF01) and then clears it with an incoming
payment (FBZ1). From an auditors’ perspective, two issues might arise: firstly, both activities are carried out by the same
person. The process instance should be checked for segregation of duties violations. Secondly, the complete amount has been
posted as revenues without any taxes. It should be checked if the sales transaction exempt from VAT taxes (Input Tax). In the
process instance on the right the user “MG” enters an incoming invoice (MIRO) and then conducts a payment (FBZ4). As a
result, it seems to be certain that a segregation of duties conflict occurred.

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

Business Activities: Accounts:

F110 Parameters for Automatic Payment (Payment run) 191100 Goods Rcvd/Invoice Rcvd (third party)
MR1M Enter Incoming Invoice (Old Version) 154000 Input tax
FB1S Clear G/L Account 160000 Trade Payables - domestic
MB01 Post Goods Receipt for PO 230051 Gain/loss Euro conversion / document difference
310000 Trading Goods
Document Types: 113101 Deutsche Bank - checks payable
ZP: Payment, RE: Invoice Receipt, WE: Goods Receipt, AB: 276000 Discount received
Accounting Document
Figure 6: A more complex purchasing process instance (displayed only partly)

Figure 6 depicts are more complex purchasing process instance. At first, goods are received (MB01) and posted to a “goods
received / invoice received” account. Then, the incoming invoice is posted (MR1M) without clearing the “goods received /
invoice received” items. An additional business activity is used to link and clear the open invoice with the open goods
received items (FB1S). This is indicated by a document without any items (this violates property 4 of the graph properties as
defined above and must be regarded to be SAP specific). The complete process instance reveals two independent “Goods
Received – Enter Invoice” sub process instances which are finally paid and cleared by one payment (F110). Again, the same
user “Bollinger” received the goods and posted the appropriate invoice without applying a system-based 4-eyes principle.

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Gehrke et al. Financial Process Mining

Validation of the Algorithm

To validate the algorithm, we applied it to several documents on open item oriented accounts. Our findings can be
summarized as follows:
(1) The algorithm works and always revealed the
complete process instance.
(2) The complexity and size of process instances vary
very widely. Complex graphs seem to evolve if different
individual process instances “run” in a “central” business
activity affecting these all together. A prominent example is
an outgoing payment to a vendor which clears e.g. all
invoices of a particular time interval. In this case, all
purchasing process instances of that time interval regarding
this vendor are linked by one big payment. Several (often
similarly structured) purchasing process instances “run” to
a central payment entry. Figure 7 shows the scheme of such
a complex process.
(3) So far, mining processes show a relatively bad
performance. Normal process instances need a couple of
minutes to be analyzed.
Figure 7 shows a very complex process instance. Each box
is one accounting document. The box in the center is a
“big” payment clearing several invoices (“inner circle”).
The “outer circle” is the goods receipt document of each
sub process instance. All process instances “run” to the
payment in the center. This complex process instance took
Figure 7: Schema of a complex process graph of a about 40 minutes to be mined using the prototypical
purchasing process instance implementation of our algorithm.

According to the findings due to the validation of the mining algorithm, we will derive the following issues to be improved in
the next research steps:

According to finding (3) the performance of the algorithm needs to be improved. The algorithm works serially and mines all
documents step by step. We are quite confident that performance improvements will be possible if the algorithm works in a
parallel manner using threads and connection pooling. This will be one of the next tasks to be implemented.

SUMMARY
In this paper we have provided and validated a basic algorithm for mining financial business process instances in ERP or
accounting information systems. The validation took place using SAP as a well known and widely-used ERP system. With
regard to this mining algorithm two aims have been achieved. Firstly, the algorithm revealed relevant documents and items
belonging to a process instance and was able to evaluate the relationships between documents and items. Secondly, process
instances have been visualized by using different symbols and colors depending on the properties of documents and items.
The visualization of financial processes shall help auditors and process managers to shift the view they have on financial
processes: from regarding a set of entries on T-accounts to a process-oriented perspective that is interwoven with a value flow
on financial accounts. Using appropriate symbols and colors of symbols this process view aims at a better and faster
understanding of the relationships within the accounting by allowing an easier cognitive processing. Future work will be
founded on the provided algorithm to aggregate accounting information as explained in the research agenda and to provide
approaches even easier to understand with respect to compliance and performance issues in accounting departments.

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