Part 5 in this series focuses on making audits easier by extending collaboration to your auditing partners to instill confidence in the data you provide and learn from the auditing experience to make improvements in your process. Our fifth best practice encompasses tips that help you work together with others across the company and your auditors to verify accuracy of data.
In Part 4, we discussed enacting a collaborative approach across the enterprise that changes how employees spend money, improving processes related to audits and ultimately producing significant savings for the company – an approach we call WeProcurementTM. In this installment, we recommend extending collaboration to your auditing partners – internal and external – by working together to give them the best intelligence they need to do their jobs better, keeping their hours down, which will save the company money.
As you pull information to give auditors, you want to perform testing to ensure logic in your methodology and accuracy of the statements you’re providing before giving it to them.
To accomplish this verification, you can
- Define Parameters: Pull reports from a system that also automatically generates the parameters used to aggregate and produce the information being presented. This helps ensure the auditors on how you are arriving at numbers and prevents incomplete or inconsistent data. This also gives the auditors the assurance that they can run the data again and get the same numbers.
- Ensure Completeness: By providing the auditors with a list of parameters used, you are giving them the specific time frame, dollar amounts, and vendor information used to create a particular request. This will allow the auditors to document exactly what was included in the data to ensure that the information they received from the client was 100% complete (for example no missing vendors or missing months)
- Use One System: One of the most dreaded tasks for accounting teams is preparing the balance sheet and income statement explanation – not because it is difficult, but because the information can live in multiple systems. Running the variance from one system and getting the details from another system can be painstaking. But being able to run the variances in one eProcurement system and offer auditors the ability to point and click to dive down into the details makes this information easier to pull and navigate.
- Ask Questions: A lot of people tend to rush audits to get back to other work and minimize face time with auditors. We encourage you to view auditors as partners and really spend time with them understanding how and why mistakes are being made, and how to fix them not just for this audit, but for future audits and better financial practices. Also make sure that you get all of your questions answered while they are on-site to easily complete action items. For independent auditors, one of the most time-consuming areas is trying to finish the audit after leaving the field, especially if they are still having to answer questions from the client company and provide explanations. When the audit team in onsite they are 100% focused on your engagement; when they leave, they are starting work on a new client and will be using their nights and weekends to complete your audit and will not be as available. Using the time they are in the field efficiently and asking questions will maximize your company’s benefit.
- Foster Collaboration with Internal Teams: Keep the lines of communication open, letting everyone know that there is an audit taking place, and help them understand what the auditors are requesting and how people can work together to produce the best results for the company. Accounting teams have the most in-depth knowledge of systems and reports, and with a little insight, can help determine the best way to extract and present the data requested by auditors. Work with these internal teams to give auditors the best intelligence and learn more about processes in your company.
To hear Verian’s own Assistant Controller Brian Pocek elaborate on this best practice and offer case study evidence from his personal experience working as an auditor and in the finance industry, download the full on-demand webinar
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