Practice
How we sample vendor payments when the ledger is huge
Random samples comfort auditors and frustrate operators who know where the pain lives. Nest’s approach for financial auditing guidance for vendor payment review layers methods instead of picking a favorite slogan.
Start with a population you can defend
Define the window, the payment types included, and what you exclude (payroll, tax remittances, intercompany if out of scope). Write the definition before you filter — otherwise the sample quietly becomes whatever was easy to export.
High-value first, then strange
Monetary-unit or top-value pulls catch concentration. Follow them with a risk-weighted slice: new vendors, bank-detail changes in the period, round-sum payments, weekend releases, and vendors with rising volume versus prior quarter. Only then add a small random layer so you cannot be accused of hunting only known dragons.
Document the misses
Your workpaper should say which risk attributes you could not filter because the ERP lacks the field. That sentence protects you later when someone asks why a fraud pattern was never in scope. Honesty about system limits is not weakness; silence is.