Transactions within Syft’s Review Tool empowers you to review any transactions in Syft that may be erroneous. We allow you to look at potential duplicate transactions, misclassified transactions, and transactions with unusual timing. Lastly, we give you the ability to review all manual journals and credit notes from your accounting provider. Our Transactions section is the final step in ensuring you have sound data quality in your accounting data. Let’s take a look at how it works.

The tool is divided into four key sections:

We'll look at each in turn.

The first transaction anomaly that Syft identifies for you is duplicates. This is where Syft analyzes your transactions and identifies potential duplicate transactions that you need to review based on the following criteria:

Using this data, Syft will identify potential duplicate transactions for you to investigate. You can then return to your underlying general ledger to review these.

If you are happy with the transaction, you can click on the review checkbox on the far right-hand side to review it. You can use the toggle to show or not show the reviewed transactions so that every time you visit this page, you will see only new, potentially duplicate transactions. If you want to make changes, you can do so in your underlying accounting provider.

This tool helps you make sure that you don't have duplicate transactions, which could lead to you overstating or understating certain accounts.

Once you have reviewed your potentially duplicate transactions, it is time to move on to the classification section within transactions. This is a feature-rich and powerful section that enables you to determine any misclassifications within your transactions. Now, what do we mean by that? Well, when you click on classifications, you have three different types of classification anomalies, based on the following criteria:

We'll go through all three to make sure you understand them properly.

This is where credit transactions appear, where debits are expected, and vice versa. Syft will show you all the accounts that have transactions that are debits, which you would expect to be credits or the inverse.

You can expand these to see the details and you can review them by clicking on the review check box. If you use Xero, use the deep links to open these transactions in Xero.

Syft uses its AI engine to determine accounts that have transaction descriptions that are different from the expected descriptions. For example, if you had interest income and most of the transactions had interest from the bank each month, and then you had a transaction in there that said "paper expenses," it would flag that in this section.

If you toggle to the transaction section, it will tell you where you have transactions with similar descriptions but different account allocations. For example, if you had interest from a bank account in the interest income and interest from a bank account in sales, it will tell you that those two transactions have similar descriptions and that you should review them to determine whether they are classified correctly.

In Value, Syft tells you where you have expenses above a certain threshold or assets below a certain threshold. Why is this? Well, if you have expenses above a certain amount, there is a question as to whether they should not be capitalized as assets. And if you have assets below a certain amount, there is a question as to whether they should not be expensed.

Syft sets thresholds for you by default, but you are able to manually change these if you would like to.

This is how you can use the review tool, specifically the classification section within transactions, to ensure that all of your transactions are in the correct accounts and have been classified appropriately.

The timing section is divided into the following sub-tabs:

Let's look at each of these in turn.

This section empowers you to explore transactions that took place outside of standard business hours. Syft flags these transactions in red so you can easily distinguish them from the blue transactions that indicate transactions during working hours. An understanding of transactions posted outside of business hours is essential for managing the risk of erroneous or malicious transactions.

You can hover over any colored bar in the table to see the amount the transaction was for, and if you click on it, you can drill down into transaction-level details. This way, you can see why the transaction occurred and determine whether it is valid or should be investigated.

In the Back Dated section, Syft will flag any transactions whose posting date has been back-dated from the creation date. This is good to examine as back-dating may be an indicator of suspicious activity.

Syft divides the view according to various time buckets, so you can see transactions that were backdated by a week, 8 days to a month, or more than a month. Once you've examined the transactions, you can mark them as reviewed.

The last sub-category under Timing is Future Dated. This works very similarly to Back Dated, except that it highlights transactions with a future-dated posting date. Here, you can also take a look at transactions within 3 different time buckets:

And you can review transactions once you are happy that they are correct.

You can watch the video below for more details:

The final section of Syft's Review tool is Manual Transactions. Here, you can review any manual transaction created in your underlying accounting provider. A manual transaction is either a manual journal or a credit note.

The screen you initially land on lists all the manual journals posted for the period in question. You can change the period in question using the date selector at the top. Otherwise, it will default to a month.

You can then scroll through each transaction and analyze it to ensure you're comfortable with it. If you are comfortable with it, you can review the transaction by clicking the review checkbox on the right-hand side.

If you no longer want to see review transactions, you can turn the toggle off, and your list will shrink as you review your data.

Lastly, we have credit notes, where you can inspect all credit notes issued by you or someone on your staff.

And make sure that you are comfortable with the credit note amount, contact, and timing. If you are comfortable, you can review again by clicking the review checkbox on the right-hand side. You can group your credit notes in the default sorting, else you can group them by contact, which will show you the name of the contact, as well as the location and other information relating to that credit note, and you can mark it as reviewed should you wish to do so.