Applying Benford's Law
First, the auditor will need to identify the population to be tested, including which transactions and numeric data will be analyzed and which will be excluded. Some types of data will not be distributed in accordance with Benford‚s Law, for reasons that are explained in greater detail in the section Limitations and Cautions
Next, the auditor will need to obtain or extract the data of interest into a file format which can be readily analyzed. There are a variety of methods to do so, depending upon what format the data initially exists. For example, if the data is stored in a "flat" file such as magnetic tape or equivalent, it will be necessary to read and extract the key fields of interest. If the data is stored in a database such as MS-Access, then it will need to be "exported" to an industry standard format ("tab" separated). Alternatively the data may reside in an ODBC compliant database such as Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, etc. There are various techniques to extract data from ODBC compliant databases such as MS-Excel Query, native database query etc.