User mode : is the mode in which users record quantitative and qualitative information about a particular company to arrive at an overall assessment of business condition.

Sensitivity Analysis: is the mode in which users test the impact of particular risk factors on the overall assessment of business condition.

Benchmarking: A particularly noteworthy feature of the system is the benchmarking  facility which enables a user to compare the quantitative and qualitative features of a particular client entity with corresponding information collected for a set of other clients. This procedure results in a report and a set of graphs which can be used to identify areas requiring particular attention and highlight opportunities for management action.

Administrative mode : is the mode used to refine the wording of questions, change relative weights given to certain answers, and to change the thresholds for conclusions. The administrative mode is password-protected.

Two separate analyses are carried out by Risk Alert internally: an evaluation of risk-indicators : uses a scoring system to assess various business risk indicators. and decision tree evaluation : is a rule-based system designed to evaluate the validity of the going concern assumption

Risk Alert contains eight modules which can be evaluated independently and in any order. The modules that comprise the system elicit both quantitative and qualitative data in the following areas:

macro economic indicators		management deficiencies
industry indicators		management fraud indicators
external indicators		operating indicators
size, age and ownership		financial indicators

The individual evaluations are summarized on the main menu, as is the overall analysis. The analyses are colour-coded in green, yellow and red to indicate the severity of weaknesses in the condition of the business and the potential business failure risk due to those weaknesses.

Financial data is recorded from balance sheets and income statements for up to five years.

Analysis is performed on almost 60 different ratios, comparing them against industry norms and searching for significant changes in indicators.

As mentioned in the introduction, these analyses can be used for a general purpose evaluation of an entity’s business condition, or for specific purposes such as to support credit applications, to support client acceptance and retention decisions, to support risk assessments for an entity and to support an auditor’s assessment of the validity of the going concern assumption.