What is Financial Analytics

The business use of data analytics is growing rapidly in the accounting environment. Similar to many new systems that involve accounting information, data analytics has fundamentally changed task based processes particularly those tasks that provide inference, prediction and assurance to decision makers. Big Data analytics is the process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling Big Data to discover and communicate useful information and patterns, suggest conclusions, and support decision making. Big Data now pervades every sector and function of the global economy. These essays focus on the uses and challenges of Big Data in accounting (measurement) and auditing (assurance). The objective of this chapter is to examine how Big Data analytics will impact the accounting and auditing environment. This is important to practitioners as well as academics because they will be using data analytics in accounting and auditing tasks and will need to have an in-depth familiarity with financial analytics to effectively accomplish these tasks and make effective and efficient decisions.