DATAS 2013 FOR EXCEL 2007/2010

INSTALLATION OF PROGRAMS

RUNNING THE PROGRAMS

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAMS

DESCRIPTION OF TABLES

TWEAKING THE FORMULAS

Copyright 1995-2013 by Mark J. Nigrini. All rights reserved

www.nigrini.com

INSTALLATION OF PROGRAMS

1. Previous editions of the software used macro-enabled workbooks. These programs worked well in the UA and Canada where the decimal point is a point "." The software could not work in the rest of the world because there Excel could not understand a statement such as "delete all numbers less than 10.00." This light version does not use macros. It does require the user to do a little work by checking the digit formulas to see whether it is calculating what the user would like to have calculated. The user can change the formula to suit his or her needs. The user is also required to copy the formulas down to the last row. Once this is done the user will be the proud owner of a data profile, and six digit related graphs. Since there are no macros there is no installation. Copy the two Excel files (one of which is a data file) to a folder on your c:\ drive. I suggest that you call the folder DATAS2013_Excel.

2. Make a backup copy of the Nigrini Cycle file.3. Datas2013_Excel contains 2 files as is shown below:

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DATAS 2009 FOR EXCEL: RUNNING THE PROGRAMS

The first step is to load your data into the Data tab and into columns A to D. The amounts to be analyzed must be in column D. The data is inserted by copying and pasting your data starting at row.2. The F5 (Go To) key will allow you to select the data range from the invoices data file,

Open the Nigrini Cycle file and open your data file. The demonstration will use the Invoices data file.

Use F5 to highlight your data in the data file,

Click OK.

Click Copy,

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Paste your data into the Nigrini Cycle file making sure that the numeric data that you want to analyze is in column D.

Click Paste.

Go back to your data file and close the file,

Go back to the Nigrini Cycle file. Copy the formulas in columns E to I all the way down to the last row. This can be done by highlighting E5:I5.

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Position the cursor so that you have a plus sign (+) in the bottom right corner of I5,

Double click on the +-sign to give,

Scroll down to the last line to see that you've copied your formulas all the way down. You can get to the last row by using the Home→End→Home combination,

You can see in row 189471 that the formulas were copied down to the last row.

The results from this analysis should follow Chapters 5, 7, and 8 of Forensic Analytics. They should also follow chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Benford's Law.

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To run the second-order test you will need to sort the data and to calculate the differences. The differences would then need to be pasted into Column D. To run the number duplication test you would use a pivot table on Column D using Insert→PivotTable→PivotTable.

and,

Click OK.

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Select Amount and CountofAmount for the Row Labels and Sigma values. You will get SumOfAmount from Excel. Left click and change the Value field setting to Count.

Your results can be seen by clicking on the tabs,

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Data Profile,

and graphs,

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TABLES

The Tables tab contains additional information

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Count: This contains the counts of the digits to the left of the count number.

Actual: This is the proportion that each count represents. For example, if the data set has 200 records and we have a count of 28, then the proportion would be 0.140 (28/200).

Benford. This contains the expected proportions of Benford's Law. For example, D3:D11 contains the expected first digit proportions and D15:D24 contains the expected second digit proportions.

Difference: This shows the difference between the actual proportions and the expected proportions. A positive difference means that the actual proportion exceeds the expected proportion.

AbsDiff: This is the absolute value of the Difference.

Z-Stat: This column shows the statistical significance of the difference between the two proportions. The significance takes into account the size of the difference (over or under), the expected proportion, and the sample size. Scores above 1.96 are significant at the 0.05 level, and above 2.57 are significant at the 0.01 level.

The Mean Absolute Deviations are also calculated:

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and these can be compared to the critical values in "Benford's Law."

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DATAS 2013 FOR EXCEL: TWEAKING THE FORMULAS

Notes:

The Amounts in column D must either be integers (whole numbers such as 2013, 32, or 1,234,567) or numbers with exactly two digits to the right of the decimal point such as dollars and cents (e.g., 22.05, 1234.56, or 0.55). Your system should recognize whatever it is that you use as the decimal point (. or ,).

The first digit formula is,=IF(D2>=(1/100),VALUE(LEFT(D2*10000,1))," blank")

This means that first digits are calculated for all numbers that are 0.01 or higher. You can make the minimum a higher amount (such as 10). The easiest way to do this is to simply delete all numbers less than 10 in a copy of your data file before copying and pasting into the Nigrini Cycle file. You can also adjust the (1/100) term in the formula to (10). You should be consistent with the minimum amount for the first, second, and first-two digit tests. So any adjustment to the formula is made to the formulas in columns D, E, and F.

The formula, as written, will not analyze negative numbers. To analyze negative numbers you need to convert them to positive numbers by using the ABS (for Absolute) function. A formula such as =ABS(C2) will give you the absolute (positive) value of the number in C2.

The result for numbers less than 0.01 (or whatever your minimum is) is " blank" This is three spaces followed by the word blank. You can change this by changing the inside characters of " blank".

The formula multiplies the numbers by 10000. This is to change a number such as 0.02 to 200 so that the LEFT function will identify the correct first digit. If 0.02 were not multiplied by 10000, then the first digit would be the decimal point ".".

The last-two digits only works correctly for numbers that are whole numbers (such as 1234) where the last-two digits are either 00 (because 1234 equals 1234.00) or 34, or for numbers that have just two digits to the right of the decimal point (such as 20.13). If you desperately want the last-two digits of numbers that have (say) four digits to the right of the decimal point (such as 1234.5678), then you'll need to multiply all the numbers by 100 (to give 123456.78) or you'll have to fiddle with the formula. You should check at least 30 rows of data for accuracy if you change a formula.

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