Modelling Normative Financial Processes with Process Mining

Financial processes are complex procedures related to financial data recording and analysis. Compliance of these processes with the normative rules is important because it is related to the correctness of financial data records, it helps to evaluate the validity of financial processes in the organization. The main issue is that organizations have limited data about how their financial processes run. Based on expert knowledge, normative patterns of financial process types can be developed. Normative rules can be quite complex, and difficult to understand, even if they are systematized in tables or text descriptions. The aim of the article is to present the possibilities of the Process Mining (PM) technology to discover a model of the normative financial process (by the example of the Expenditure cycle). The primary data in this kind of PM project is a list of the meta-events indicating allowed transitions between financial transaction entities (journal types, document types, account names, etc.), i.e. this meta-event-log. The result of PM is a visualization of the normative rules – the meta-model, convenient to analyze by an expert, to reveal properties of financial processes. The Meta-model of the normative financial process (pattern) could be further used as criteria (restriction) in analyzing financial data records and detecting anomalies in financial data. The experiment results (using the Expenditure cycle as an example) reveal the capability of using meta-models (patterns of financial transactions) in financial data analysis with PM tools.