Preparing for an Audit

Doing audits on a regular basis is important, it can help you analyze a business’s financial records and verify their accuracy and completeness. An audit will help you to go through different aspects systematically and will help you to understand more about your financial transactions.

Conducting an audit can help you to check the accuracy of your business finances and processes, find errors in different financial processes, you can even start implementing new accounting or business strategies, and make better business decisions.

Start Planning the Audit of Your Company

During this process everything must be clear, old documents should be researched and compared to new financial statistics that the company has now. Based on this information basic audit program can be created.

You need to know which areas of your business need an audit, who will conduct the audit, also when it will begin and when will it end, and how frequently it will be done generally. Create an audit schedule where you’ll see which aspects of your company will be audited, when, and how to always have detailed information.

Identifying Potential Errors

It’s important to determine any aspects that might not go well enough with the company and its goals, you can use the recommandations of the audit team or just go through different aspects of the company. Every company has specific ways of working and they are operating in different environments, so it’s crucial to consider many different topics while identifying potential errors. 

Notify Your Employees

Departments should be notified about audits and their purpose. Sometimes there is a surprise audit as well when companies think that they might be dealing with some suspicious activities. But in normal circumstances, you have to alert your employees and ask them to provide you with documents that are necessary for the audit.

Opening Meeting

This type of meeting includes management and every administrative personnel that’s somehow related to the audit. In this case, you’ll be discussing the purpose and significance of audits. The audit program might go through some changes based on what will be discussed in the meeting.

At the end of the audit process, your discoveries might push you to change many aspects of your company so it’s better to let your team deal with the idea that some things might not be the same anymore and soon you might start working on different strategies to improve your business.

Start Conducting the Audit

You have to start taking the first steps after going through the previous stages. Make sure that you’ll have all the necessary documents gathered from your team members, you also have to know more about their skills and generally determine how they could help you now, you can do reviews about business processes as well.

Document and Report Your Findings

Write down and analyze every new aspect that you discovered and evaluate how your findings could improve your business. Analyze the main gain of the audit and what other people around you think about it because they might see totally new side of things.

The more details you have, the better you understand what works and what doesn’t in your company. You might connect the important dots and find out that aspects that seemed irrelevant to you actually hold an important place and vice versa.

Make Changes

Use your audit results to make changes. Don’t discard the findings that could make great changes to your company. But first of all, analyze everything and determine what’s the most important aspect and what changes need to be made.

For example, you might discover that you need additional training for your employees, you might need to change a business process, or maybe you need to update financial statements and many more. You’ll be able to discover and correct lots of issues this way.

Solutions for Audit Management

There are numerous software and solutions that could help you with any process which is connected to audit. For example, AuditBoard’s platform can help you to leverage risk as a strategic driver. HighBond can process a large amount of data for you and is very user-friendly. Based on your goals you can choose any tools that would make your job easier and more efficient.

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