Unit Synopsis
As the economy moves towards more digital disruption, management and auditors are seeking innovative technologies for generating timely information for decision making. The unit is designed to provide you with an understanding of how financial data of an organisation can be analysed in a timely manner using data analytics. You are introduced to concepts, tools, software and methodologies of business intelligence and how they are applied to the analysis of financial data. You will gain experience in analysing accounting audit trails, using audit software, detecting potential fraud, visualising data, and generating dashboards for performance reporting. This unit is suitable for students with minimal information systems background.
Details
| Level | Postgraduate |
|---|---|
| Unit Level | 9 |
| Credit Points | 6 |
| Student Contribution Band | SCA Band 4 |
| Fraction of Full-Time Student Load | 0.125 |
| Pre-requisites or Co-requisites |
Pre-requisite ACCT20072 Accounting Systems & Information Assurance
Important note: Students enrolled in a subsequent unit who failed their pre-requisite unit, should drop the subsequent unit before the census date or within 10 working days of Fail grade notification. Students who do not drop the unit in this timeframe cannot later drop the unit without academic and financial liability. See details in the Assessment Policy and Procedure (Higher Education Coursework). |
| Class Timetable | View Unit Timetable |
| Residential School | No Residential School |
Unit Availabilities from Term 2 - 2025
Attendance Requirements
All on-campus students are expected to attend scheduled classes - in some units, these classes are identified as a mandatory (pass/fail) component and attendance is compulsory. International students, on a student visa, must maintain a full time study load and meet both attendance and academic progress requirements in each study period (satisfactory attendance for International students is defined as maintaining at least an 80% attendance record).
Recommended Student Time Commitment
Each 6-credit Postgraduate unit at CQUniversity requires an overall time commitment of an average of 12.5 hours of study per week, making a total of 150 hours for the unit.
Assessment Tasks
| Assessment Task | Weighting |
|---|---|
| 1. Practical Assessment | 20% |
| 2. Project (applied) | 30% |
| 3. Take Home Exam | 50% |
This is a graded unit: your overall grade will be calculated from the marks or grades for each assessment task, based on the relative weightings shown in the table above. You must obtain an overall mark for the unit of at least 50%, or an overall grade of ‘pass’ in order to pass the unit. If any ‘pass/fail’ tasks are shown in the table above they must also be completed successfully (‘pass’ grade). You must also meet any minimum mark requirements specified for a particular assessment task, as detailed in the ‘assessment task’ section (note that in some instances, the minimum mark for a task may be greater than 50%).
Past Exams
All University policies are available on the Policy web site, however you may wish to directly view the following policies below.
This list is not an exhaustive list of all University policies. The full list of policies are available on the Policy web site .
Term 1 - 2025 : The overall satisfaction for students in the last offering of this course was 0.00% (`Agree` and `Strongly Agree` responses), based on a 26.32% response rate.
Feedback, Recommendations and Responses
Every unit is reviewed for enhancement each year. At the most recent review, the following staff and student feedback items were identified and recommendations were made.
Source: Teaching team
Ensure support materials adequately prepare students for assessments.
Workshop activities will be enhanced to adequately prepare students for their assessments.
Additional workshop materials and assessment information were provided.
Source: SUTE
Students requested more feedback relating to practical assessments.
A details marking rubric with additional feedback commentary is provided to each student for each assessment. These will be enhanced for the next iteration of the unit.
In Progress
Source: SUTE
Regarding some of the low scoring items in SUTE, i.e. unit requirements and learning materials
New casual staff will continue to be briefed at the commencement of the term to ensure that students are made aware of the unit requirements and structure of the unit website and materials.
In Progress
On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- Describe and distinguish data concepts, decision support systems, data warehouses, and data analytics, and perform querying of data
- Apply data analytics and data visualisation software to provide information for management and auditors
- Analyse data structures and extract accounting audit trails from computerised accounting systems
- Design audit procedures and apply audit software in substantive testing and fraud detection
- Apply performance management principles and develop performance dashboards and other visual presentations for management.
| Assessment Tasks | Learning Outcomes | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| 1 - Practical Assessment | • | • | |||
| 2 - Project (applied) | • | • | • | • | |
| 3 - Take Home Exam | • | • | • | • | |
| Graduate Attributes | Learning Outcomes | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| 1 - Knowledge | • | • | • | • | • |
| 2 - Communication | • | • | |||
| 3 - Cognitive, technical and creative skills | • | • | • | • | |
| 4 - Research | • | ||||
| 5 - Self-management | • | • | |||
| 6 - Ethical and Professional Responsibility | • | ||||
| Assessment Tasks | Graduate Attributes | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 8 | |