Use Smart Insights: statistical checks, trend analysis, what-if scenarios and benchmarks

Anomaly Detection is the one detector you can run yourself: Smart Insights › Detection & Alerts › Run Detection scans last month's posted journal items account by account and flags any line more than three standard deviations from that account's own average as an Unusual Amount — Critical beyond four deviations, High otherwise, each with its Z-score and a plain-language explanation. If nothing is found you get a notification with the number of transactions analysed. Triage each finding with Mark Reviewed, Confirm Issue, or Dismiss; there is no way to re-open a dismissed record.

The three sibling registers hold other alert types, each with its own triage flow:

A scenario takes a base period of actuals and applies three percentage levers — Revenue Change %, COGS Change %, and Operating Expense Change %. Calculate fills the base figures, the adjusted figures, and the revenue and profit impact. That is the whole model: to test "aluminium billet up 15%", you translate it yourself into a COGS percentage — the scenario works on whole account-type totals and knows nothing about individual materials, products, or projects. Scenarios have no lock or approval state; every record stays editable.

Benchmark Standards ships twelve generic industry ratio tables (General, Manufacturing, Construction, Retail, Services, and so on) covering margins, liquidity, leverage, DSO/DPO, and turnover. They are textbook reference values with no source citation, no region, and nothing fenestration-specific — for a Qatar window fabricator, treat Manufacturing or Construction as a rough yardstick, and edit the values (or add your own standard) if you have better figures. Compare computes your company's year-to-date ratios from the ledger and grades each against the benchmark (good within 110%, poor below 90%, reversed for debt and DSO where lower is better), producing an overall score built from five of the ratios plus templated recommendations. Two approximations to keep in mind when reading it: inventory is estimated as 30% of current assets, and extreme values are clamped rather than shown raw. Print PDF and Export Excel work on the comparison form.

Auto-Accruals lists suggested month-end expense accruals: where an account-and-supplier pair has averaged a monthly cost over the last six months and this month is short, the shortfall is suggested with a confidence figure. In this release the register is review-only from the interface — Accept and Reject record your verdict, but no button posts the journal entry, and suggestions themselves are generated from the shell, not on a schedule. Book the accrual as a manual journal entry and use the suggestion as your working paper.

Smart Import loads a CSV or XLSX file into journal entries, journal items, partners, or the chart of accounts — those four models only. It guesses the column mapping from the headers (keyword matching, which you review and correct), parses dates in several formats, strips currency symbols, and resolves links by id, name, or code. The preview shows the first 20 rows; the import then runs row by row, skipping failures into an error log rather than stopping. Imported journal entries land as drafts — nothing is posted for you. Note the preview's error counters always read zero (validation happens only at import time), the Skip Duplicates and Update Existing switches are not implemented in this release, and a saved Import Template only pre-selects the import type — the column mapping is re-guessed each time.

Report Builder defines custom row-and-column financial statements: rows are titles, accounts, account groups, safe-evaluated formulas over other rows, subtotals and totals; columns can show balance, debit, credit, or quantity (the other column types in the list — budget, variance, comparison, YTD — compute nothing in this release and return zero). Every edit auto-saves a version you can restore. Export the result with Export PDF; the on-screen Generate Report preview and the Export Excel button are non-functional in this release, and Report Templates is the same list filtered to records marked as templates — picking a template does not copy its rows onto a new report.

"Detection complete. Analyzed N transactions. No new anomalies found." — a normal result: no line last month deviated more than three standard deviations from its account's average, or the accounts had fewer than five lines each.

"Not enough data found for the selected period. Need at least 3 months of data." — widen the trend-analysis date range; the wizard needs three distinct months of posted entries.

Duplicate, Missing Entry, Trend Alert, KPI, or Year-over-Year lists are empty — their generators are not wired to any button or schedule in this release; ask your administrator to run them, or rely on Anomaly Detection and Generate Analysis, which are.

Generate Report shows nothing / "Excel export will be generated." — both are known gaps in the Report Builder this release; use Export PDF.

"openpyxl is not installed. Please install with: pip install openpyxl" — the server lacks the XLSX library; import the file as CSV or ask your administrator to install it.

An accepted accrual never hits the ledger — accepting only records the decision; post the journal entry yourself under Accounting › Journal Entries.