Accounting Auditing
Tackler has features to support accounting auditing, assurance actions and financial audit.
For supporting accounting auditing, tackler can provide:
-
Proof of used accounting data
-
Proof of used set of transactions
-
Validation of all used accounts
-
Validation of all used commodities
-
Proof of used reporting parameters
-
Extensive test setup
Tackler’s features for Auditing and Assurance actions
Proof of accounting data
Tackler’s Git storage backend provides immutable, cryptographic strong evidence of used data. This information is included in reports' metadata. It is also possible to rerun reports based on old, original data, and be assured that same data was used for new calculations that was used originally in the past.
See Git Storage and examples section for further details.
Proof of used set of transactions
Tackler can provided checksum of transaction set used in accounting calculations. This can be used as an evidence and assurance that all wanted transactions are included into calculations. This txn set checksum can be easily calculated without Tackler.
Information provided by Git storage backend and Txn Set Checksum combined together creates immutable and persistent evidence of used accounting data in calculations.
Tackler contrib has an example script txn-set-checksum.sh to demonstrate how to externally calculate Txn Set Checksum.
See examples section and TEP-1007: Txn Set Checksum for more infromation.
Validation of accounts
In strict mode, Tackler will only accept pre-defined accounts. Strict account name validation makes it impossible that transaction would leak into unknown account.
If accounting system allows usage of undefined accounts and doesn’t enforce account name validation, it is possible to loose or leak value into unknown, not tracked accounts, even when transactions still balance internally perfectly.
See accounts.conf for further info.
Validation of commodities
In addition to strict mode for accounts, tackler supports strict mode for commodities. In fact, if strict mode for accounts is activated, then it is also activated for commodities at the same time.
When strict mode is activated, it is possible to set configuration option that allows empty commodities (e.g. value posts without unit or commodity).
See accounts.conf for further info.
Proof of used reporting parameters
Accounting reports generated by Tackler include account selector checksum, when Txn Set Checksum is activated.
Account Selector checksum is checksum of conditions which is used to determine which accounts will be included into reports and calculations. Account Selector Checksum is easier and more straight forward to audit than verbatim listing of long and potentially complex accounts selector definition.
See examples section and TEP-1007: Txn Set Checksum for further info.
Tackler’s test setup
Tackler and it’s test setup are open source, so it’s possible to do external audit of code base, tests or both.
Tackler’s code base is tested extensively. Testing includes unit and logical testing to validate tacklers features. Tackler is also tested with large transaction sets (up to one million transactions) to detect any anomalies with larger data sets. Tackler’s unit tests includes test cases up to one hundred thousand transactions.
For further info, see:
Examples of reports with audit metadata
Below are links to test reports with audit metadata:
Same information is available with JSON format for Server and Client API: