There are two versions of ActiveData – the more popular ActiveData for Excel ($129-249), which functions as an add-in for Microsoft Excel, and the more powerful ActiveData from Office/SQL($349), a standalone solution that allows users to work with data sets too large to manipulate in Microsoft Excel. The ActiveData platform from InformationActive has been around since 2003 and was founded by one of the developers of the IDEA audit platform. With that in mind, publishers have created tools which help automate data testing and analysis, including InformationActive’s ActiveData platform and CCH Teammate Analytics. While the automated audit data analysis tools like the ACL platform and Caseware IDEA are powerful, we also understand from users that these tools are complex enough that you need to deploy them with a subset of specially trained analysts instead of the average accountant. These tools represent a change in how we work which can help us all save time and make fewer errors by having a standardized toolset.
These tools make it possible for relative novices to quickly create analysis which would have taken hours or days to create in the past.
Whether we’re learning about end user tools for accounting firms like InformationActive’s Active Data or Wolters Kluwer’s TeamMate Analytics, or we’re learning about self-service business intelligence tools for our clients like Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, and Tableau, the new tools make it much easier the average user to take data and turn it into information. This precludes the need to write the Criteria from scratch and makes Equation Building in IDEA convenient and repeatable with a quick learning and application cycle.One of the more interesting areas for new offerings in accounting technology has been the emergence of toolsets to automate the analysis of data sets. But after you clear the Criteria if you go back to Criteria on the right side of the IDEA screen under the Properties toolbar and right click on Criteria you will see your saved Criteria displayed. Up and until this point it is a task similar to MS-Excel. Now the Criteria is entered through the Equation Editor in IDEA, filtered records extracted to a new database in IDEA and Criteria cleared to get back the original database. A Criteria can be written in IDEA as an example to capture/extract retirement of Fixed Assets where a loss has been incurred on retirement or say depreciation has not been computed for the broken period up and until the retirement date. In IDEA, Criteria is the parallel of the MS-Excel Filter. The Filter once removed, if needed to be brought back once again, has to be written once again in MS-Excel. Once a Filter is applied in MS-Excel and it serves the purpose of extraction, the user promptly removes the filter and moves to the next task. We use Filters in MS-Excel regularly and it plays an important part in extracting records from one worksheet to another worksheet in Excel.
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