What about the 'Audit Workbench' module in D365FO?

The Audit Workbench module. At least you can say this is the smallest module of D365FO. When you expand all options in the module, you will have only four functionalities to choose from:

What is the purpose of this module? And how does it work? That is where this article is about.

What is the reason of the Audit Workbench module?

In the Audit Workbench module you can create internal audit policies. These policies can be used to evaluate expense reports, vendor invoices and purchase orders to make sure that they comply with your company policy rules.

By example you can create a policy rule that:

• when a vendor sends an invoice to your company with the same amount within thirty days, you want to evaluate these invoices.
• for internal audit purposes you want that random one of the hundred invoices will be picked for an audit sample.
• when an employee uses an expense report and the world 'alcohol' exist in it, you want to audit this expense report to see if it fits the company policies.

How does this work?

Summarized you have to:

1. Create a policy rule type (what kind of check needs to be done?).
2. Create an audit policy (link the policy type to a legal entity to be used).
3. Run the batch to make the policy work.
4. Check if audit cases are created and follow up if there are any.

Prerequisite is that you have at least one (child) case category from category type 'Audit' in the case category setup of the Organization Administration module.

Create a policy rule type

First I go to the option 'Policy rule type' in the Audit Workbench module. I click on 'New' to create a new line. I enter my own rule name and description and select that for vendor invoices I want to use the query type 'Sampling'.

These query types are related to the kind of check that you want to be done:

In my case I use 'Sampling', which means that I want to do a random audit check for a specified percentage of the invoices, but if you want to know what kind of checks the other types do, you can read it on the related Microsoft Learn page.

Create an audit policy (link the policy type to a legal entity to be used).

With this policy rule type created, I go to the option 'Audit policies'. Here I create a new audit policy where I link the audit policy to company 'USMF'.

I scroll down and by the 'Policy rules' area I create a new policy rule for the policy rule type 'Sample invoice check':

In the policy rule I select the date when the rule needs to be applied on and enter the sample percentage of 3%. I don't use the filter for auditing only specific vendors or dates, but confirm the settings.

Run the batch to make the policy work

In the Audit policy page, select the created audit policy and at the top of the screen go to 'Additional options'. Here select the document selection range date for the current action and select batch at the bottom of the screen to create a batch job for creating audit cases for this policy (with or without recurrence).

Each time the policy batch job has been run successfully, D365FO will update the starting date to the date when the policy process ended to prevent overlaps in the document selection date range. If you change this dates later, D365FO will warn you for overlap or a gap between the dates:

When finished and created the batch job, in the batch job list a new job is visible:

Check if audit cases are created and follow up if there are any

When audit cases are created via this batch job, you can find them in the option 'Audit cases' in the Audit workbench module. Based on the settings above an audit case is created for the sample invoice check:

In this audit case several invoices are associated to be eudited (random 3% of the posted vendor invoices).

Now I can check the by the system selected invoices for an audit and handle the case with the standard case options in D365FO.

So the Audit workbench module gives you the possibilities to setup your internal audit checks when it comes to expenses, purchase orders or vendor invoices.

Additional setting to prevent duplicate invoices

Even with the option to create audit cases for duplicate vendor invoices, also the Accounts Payable parameter 'Check the invoice number used' can help here. With this parameter you can control that you can't use the same vendor invoice number for the same vendor:

This parameter will manage that when you post a second invoice with the same invoice number as an earlier posted invoice for that vendor, the posting will be canceled and you will be warned: