Process Model Representation Layers for Financial Audits

Business processes play a significant role in financial audits. They are carried out by auditors who require diverse information for this purpose. Process mining techniques offer new opportunities to exploit data from ERP systems to generate reliable process models very effectively and efficiently. Traditional process models are only suited to provide information on a single process. This study illustrates how diverse information aspects that are required for process audits can be provided to the auditor by using different process model types that relate to different representation layers. Process mining techniques commonly operate on the business process and instance level. This study introduces process map and process stream models as higher level abstractions of multiple business processes. The introduction of higher-level process models in combination with traditional model types allows an all-encompassing representation of information aspects that are relevant for process audits in the context of financial audits.