Financial audit assists in providing clarity to the business by identifying how well internal controls and financial reporting are working and which process improvements should be given priority. Audit can be time consuming, tedious and nerve wracking. Searching for documents and sorting them out as per the requirements of the auditor takes a lot of time. This is usually determined by the no. of daily transactions being handled within a company.
How do we handle our audit process? Is it easy and flawless or is it tedious and nerve wracking? Searching for and sorting documents as per the auditors requirements can take time if the documents are in paper format.It will also take the auditor quite some time to go through your accounting documents even if they are well organized. The paper documents slow down the audit process and can be very frustrating.
When a company is managing its documents using a paper based process. At the end of the year, they provide the auditor with the required paper documents. The auditor wants his documents arranged in a specific way to ease his work. To give the auditor what he wants. A number of staff have to stop the productive work they were doing and assist in searching and identifying the right documents.
The process forces them to go searching for the required documents in the filing cabinets and maybe also in the stores. This can be tedious and can take days for the documents to be found. This stops them from doing their productive work for a period of time to assist the auditor. This is time consuming and unproductive.
It would be a game changer if the company had decided to put in an electronic document management system in place. This would speed up the audit process of this company and save them time and minimize frustrations. The auditor would have his secured space with user rights of digitally captured financial documents. At the end of every year the auditor can easily access these documents by the click of a button. The automated workflow ensures that the books are organized, factual and easy to understand. This makes all business documents searchable in a few clicks making it easy for the auditors to search for by criteria such as supplier name, product type, amount, or date or full text search. This can happen when there is full integration of the financial software with the document management system. It would allow the auditors to access supporting information without leaving the accounting system or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). making the whole auditing process not only easier for the auditor but also for the company’s other staff. With electronic document management the information can be easily findable whether its source was emails, contracts, or financial statements. Data is accessible whenever they require them without delay. The other staff will not also stop their work to assist in document search. Not only is time saved but also productivity will improve. Audit process will also be faster and data more accurate. That would be a great place to work