Method
A finance system shows what was recorded. Not always what happened.
Refero’s analysis team2 min read
Translated from Swedish. First published in Swedish on 10 February 2026. Read in Swedish
A finance system is built to record events: an invoice arrives, is approved, coded and paid. Each step leaves a trace. That trace is exactly what a traditional report is built on.
But a trace describes only what was recorded, not necessarily what was correct. If an invoice is approved with the wrong VAT rate, it is paid anyway. If a supplier invoices a price that differs from the contract, the payment goes through anyway, as long as the invoice looks reasonable in other respects. The system does exactly what it is built to do: record. It is not built to question.
Why do discrepancies not show up in the reports?
Reports are generated from the same data in which the discrepancy arose. An incorrect coding does not show up as an error in an income statement. It shows up as one entry among thousands of others, correctly totalled on the basis of its own, incorrect premises. Reading the report once more does not solve the problem. It takes an analysis that goes behind the entries, to the underlying transactions, contracts and rules they should have followed.
What Refero does differently
Refero analyses historical transactions against the reality they should reflect: contracts, price lists, tax rules and payment flows as a whole, not a sample. Where a discrepancy is identified, it is verified against the underlying documentation before it is reported. The difference between recorded information and verified financial reality is the object of the analysis.
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