Structured data for audit process

Auditing is one of the fundamental services this international accountancy company is providing . This means to make sure that what is declared in the financial statements corresponds to the reality, rules and regulations. This has to be done with high efficiency because every minute counts. Repetitive tasks have to be reduced so that employees can focus on what really matters. Therefore the company wants to achieve: - Decrease time spent on the repetitive tasks within the audit. - Moving the energy from simple tasks to the more valuable ones for their clients. - Maintain the high quality standards the company has in auditing even though the amount of data is increasing. For the auditing process an extremely large amount of documents has to be analyzed (audit evidence) and checked what is written there and combine it with other sources of information. The input comes in a large variety of formats (like pdf’s, excel’s, jpeg’s) and shapes. Therefore it can be a challenge to turn all this data into structured information to be further tested and validated. The company is already working on solutions based on technologies such as Optical character recognition (OCR), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and neural networks, but is interested in the ideas of innovative companies to develop a solution to turn unstructured data from different sources into a structured and auditable flow of data, without losing the trace to its original source. Collaboration will be based on a Research Cooperation Agreement or a Technical Cooperation Agreement. IMPORTANT: This Technology Request refers to an innovation challenge published on an open internet platform. If an organization expresses interest before closing date, it will be guided towards this open innovation platform. After registration participants can browse free through other submissions and engage in discussions. All submissions will get feedback by the company on this open platform. The challenge closes on May 27th, 2019. Mind that posts on this platform are not confidential. Beside open discussions on the platform, sharing of confidential information will be made possible on demand. After that, the firm will select the SME's with whom they would like to cooperate in the development of a solution. Once the challenge is closed, Expressions of Interest for this technology request will be treated in the traditional way.