Data Wrangling : General Ledger as CSV : Import and data types
The first step of an audit is to get the financial information you are auditing from your client. At the very least this comprises a set of financial statements and a trial balance. Preferably your client will also give you a data dump of the full general ledger. At some point you will get other supporting schedules like aged debt, fixed asset registers and the ilk. We'll get to them in due course. To get us up and running, we're going to rule out working with client documentations which are PDFs, because they require additional steps to get into R. Get your client into the habit of giving you documents in a file format which you can work with immediately! The two main file formats we are going to look at are CSV and XLSX. These should cover 99% of audits. Today is all about CSVs. A CSV (Comma Separated Value) file is a common export document type for data from financial reporting software. It stores data in a tabular structure in a plain text format. This means it can be opene...