Fraud · Leakage · Financial crime
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that a typical organisation loses close to 5% of its annual revenue to fraud. Much of it is concealed within ordinary invoices, vendor records and approvals that are rarely questioned. TRACE analyses your own data and identifies where value is being lost, and how much.
Source: ACFE Report to the Nations
The principle
TRACE was built on a single conviction: a finding is only as valuable as your ability to stand behind it. Many tools hand over a number while hiding the reasoning, which leaves you exposed the moment someone asks how you know. TRACE works the way a forensic examiner does. It assumes nothing, tests every transaction rather than a sample, and shows its work. Every finding is explained in plain language, quantified in money, and traced to the exact transaction that produced it, so whatever the question, there is always an answer behind it.
What it finds
The forms of leakage that hide within ordinary numbers, which standard accounting software does not surface:
The same invoice paid more than once, under a slightly altered reference.
Payments held just beneath an approval threshold to avoid sign-off.
A single purchase divided into parts to remain below authorisation limits.
Vendors that receive payment yet never appear on the approved-supplier list.
Recurring service contracts that inflate steadily beyond the value of the work.
Stock recorded in the accounts but absent from the floor, quantified precisely.
If any of these raises a question about your own operations, that is precisely the purpose.
Beneath the surface
Some of the costliest losses never look like losses. A duplicate payment, an inflated contract or a supplier that should not exist can appear as entirely ordinary, correctly recorded transactions. Everything balances; nothing seems out of place. Finding them takes more than a routine look: a forensic examination of every transaction at once, and the patterns between them. That is what TRACE is built to do.
“Do the numbers add up?”
Everything balances and reconciles. The records look exactly as they should.
“Do the numbers hold up?”
A duplicate payment, a padded contract, a supplier that should not exist. Easy to miss one at a time, and quietly costly over a year.
Between those two questions is where the money goes.
Across every transaction, not a sample, TRACE shows exactly where money is leaking and how much it is costing you.
Each finding arrives with a clear, prioritised action, mapped to the point in your process where the control belongs.
The aim is a lasting control that stops the same loss recurring, not a one-time patch you have to repeat.
The forensic view
The strongest control is not catching fraud after it happens. It is knowing the numbers are examined in full, and examined regularly. Consistent scrutiny, not a one-time check, is what creates deterrence.
Who it is for
Provide the invoice, vendor and stock records you already maintain. Receive a board-ready report that shows where value is being lost, and which issues to address first.
Independent case reviews, alert triage and SAR/SMR drafting support. Every case is prepared to an audit-ready standard, mapped to your jurisdiction, with the reporting deadline tracked.
The workspace
Client login above opens TRACE Nexus, the workspace where every engagement actually runs. Evidence, entities, findings and sanctions screening live in one connected case, not five disconnected spreadsheets, and every action is logged and attributable to a named reviewer. This is not a separate demo. It is the same 11 detectors, 45 signals and tamper-evident decision trace described on this page, with a case workspace built around them.
Upload records once. Every file is hashed and stored with a chain-of-custody record before any analysis runs.
Shared identifiers across records are surfaced as a suggestion. A reviewer confirms, rejects, or asks for more evidence: never an automatic merge.
Each confirmed finding drafts into a case note: summary, timeline, evidence gaps, next steps, edited and approved by a named reviewer before it counts as anything.
Confidential by design
Handing over financial data is a matter of trust. Yours is processed on controlled systems under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, used only for your engagement, and never shared or sold. Consent is recorded, and you may request access, correction or deletion.
Why the name
The name reflects the method, and the method is what lets any conclusion hold up. Every finding is integrity-hashed, cited to the regulation or control standard behind it, and attributed to a named reviewer, never treated as an accusation. You can follow the money from the headline figure all the way back to the single source record that produced it. So whatever is asked of a finding, by a board, an examiner or a regulator, the trail is already there to answer it.
The practice
TRACE Risk Advisory is led by Himaja Prabhala, its Principal Consultant, specialising in forensic accounting, fraud examination and financial-crime analysis. That expertise was built in the UK, conducting forensic accounting work within financial-crime investigations: tracing suspicious fund flows, reviewing financial records and transactions for irregularities, and identifying the accounting patterns behind fraud. Every engagement is handled personally and owned from start to finish, so the person examining your numbers is the person accountable for what they find. The review is independent, with no stake in the outcome, only in the evidence. No hand-offs, no black box. The framework behind TRACE is set out in her published research.
The foundation
TRACE is not off-the-shelf software. It is the working implementation of a documented framework for financial-crime detection, set out in a preprint available for independent review. The method behind every finding is documented, citable, and open to review.
Preprint
TRACE: An Interactive AI and Compliance-by-Design Framework for Financial Crime Detection
Himaja Prabhala, 2026 · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20699574
Findings come from defined rules, not guesswork, so a result can be reproduced and stood behind, never conjured.
Regulatory citations are drawn from a fixed, verified library, so a finding is never supported by an invented rule.
The method assists the examiner, it does not replace judgement. A person agrees, overrides or escalates every finding.
Designing solutions that add real value
Start with a short, no-obligation review of a sample of your data, and see what TRACE surfaces before you commit.
or email contact@traceriskadvisory.com