Financial Reconciliation and Auditing with KNIME

KNIME for Finance Roadshow will be making a stop in Stockholm on October 10, 2024 with our elite partner Redfield.

Presentation 1 : Understanding Financial Performance: Mastering Bank Reconciliation with KNIME by ​Elisabeth Richter, KNIME

Rule number one in accounting: Always be aware of your company’s financial performance. So, you basically want to understand precisely where your money is coming from and going to, and you need to make sure that the numbers in the respective records are correct and in agreement.
The process of comparing two sets of records is called Reconciliation and it is a common accounting procedure. This presentation focuses on one type of Reconciliation – Bank Reconciliation – which compares a company’s internally recorded transactions with the transactions recorded externally by the bank. You will learn:

• what bank reconciliation is and why it is important for businesses,
• how to create a bank reconciliation statement,
• how to semi-automate bank reconciliation with KNIME and how to transform it into a shareable Data App, and
• the advantages of using KNIME for financial tasks.

Presentation 2: Financial Reconciliation and Auditing with KNIME using Machine Learning and LLMs by Jacob Coles, Redfield

KNIME offers several tools towards a practical approach for reconciling entries between bank statements, ledgers, and other financial documents. KNIME can assist with automating the initial stages of data integration and preparation, structuring data from various formats and sources into a coherent dataset.

Once the data has been linked and transformed into a common format, statistical methods or machine learning algorithms can be used to analyse these datasets to identify discrepancies or patterns, in order to pinpoint inconsistencies between reported figures in different sources such as ledgers and bank statements. In addition, we can use large language models (LLMs) such as GPT to extract relevant context and/or entities from textual documents and financial reports to further enhance analysis and links between documents. These LLMs can effectively interpret the context and content of various document types, potentially resulting in a faster reconciliation process.

In our presentation we will provide an overview of our process and some examples of how KNIME can be used to ensure compliance in the auditing process. We will demonstrate a simple use case similar to how we have helped our clients match entries between different types of financial documents by using a combination of text-search and other techniques.

Agenda:
1:00 PM - 1:10 PM - Welcome and reception
1:10 PM - 1:40 PM - Understanding Financial Performance: Mastering Bank Reconciliation with KNIME and Q&A
1:40 PM - 2:10 PM - Financial Reconciliation and Auditing with KNIME using Machine Learning and LLMs and Q&A
2:10 PM - 2:20 PM - Closing Remarks
2:20 PM - 4:00 PM - Networking and refreshments

Meet the speakers:

Elisabeth Richter is part of the Evangelism team at KNIME and works as a Data Scientist with a particular focus on the books published under the KNIME Press. Besides that, she engages with the KNIME community on social media and in presentations, workshops, and events both online and onsite. She holds a master’s degree in Social and Economic Data Science from the University of Konstanz, Germany.

Jacob Coles is a graduate Mechatronics Engineer from Australia who went on to complete a Masters of Language Technology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He has then gone to work at Redfield AB where he has worked extensively with KNIME and other tech.

Onsite Address:
Downtown Camper
Room: R12, Drottninggatan 28, Stockholm