How to always be prepared for a successful audit

If you are like most businesses, you find regulatory and management reporting obligations high-stress situations. The amount of data required, manual spreadsheets, macros and legacy systems is enough to keep you up at night. You may not even be sure if you have the data, and if you do, you can't be certain it's accurate. And if the audit is coming from regulators or the ATO, then the situation is even more stressful because they will ask you about data for periods that are potentially outside of the timeframe you’ve been at the organisation.

So, what to do then?  

How does one be confident and at ease when it comes to audit time? The key is to always be prepared. By instilling a culture of compliance into your workplace and an efficient system that takes care of the back-end, you’ll establish your pathway to audit bliss. 

Culture of compliance

Instilling a culture of compliance into your workplace means for you and your team to develop habits that treat audit preparation as a year-long process. As professionals, we all try to abide by the rules, but getting supporting data or documentation when you were not even at the company yet can be a nightmare. Decisions were made by someone else due to circumstances in the past that you cannot imagine now, and chances are the rationale wasn’t properly documented in a way that is easy to understand. So now you are the face of the organisation and responsible for answering to regulators and auditors, but unable to provide context for historical data.

A culture of compliance embeds compliance into everyday workflow. It sets the foundation and expectations for individual staff behaviour across an organisation. But in today’s digital era, most of these behaviours can be incorporated in the systems.

Organise your data

In today's digital age, as data grows, it becomes increasingly challenging to organise and manage. The use of Excel spreadsheets and legacy Access systems will no longer cut it. One of the most important investments you can make for your company is a platform or software that streamlines, collates and automates your data for you. Not only will such a system save you time and money some audit time, but it will provide you with insights and opportunities on which to capitalise. It will also keep your employees’ work stress within limits and increase employee retention. 

A good data organisation platform creates a repository of audit schedules that can be accessed by auditors for years to come. It enables process automation, workflow and reporting. It will not only create an audit trail for workflow, but it will also help you achieve a paperless environment.

With GDPR and the Kenneth Hayne Banking Royal Commission, compliance reporting and successful audits are more essential than ever. What's challenging is if organisations don’t have the ability to access their data efficiently. New and strict regulatory requirements requires reconsideration on the approach of data governance. With the ever-increasing use of data, regulators are asking to report more data points, particularly from financial institutions.

Imagine a system that not only generates your reports but also provides:

1-   Source data

2-   Supporting calculations

3-   Manual adjustments

4-   Business rules applied at the time

5-   Multi level approval system to ensure a compliance culture 

If all the above are intact in a bundle, then whether it is a GST audit or just a statutory audit you will have a packet ready for your auditors to take and analyse. Your team is still focusing on BAU activities and no one is sitting there after hours trying to collect the data or numbers.

Creating a culture of compliance in your workplace is something you will have to take control of. However, what will make it easier for your team is to have an efficient data management and fully traceable reporting system in place. It is these two factors that will ensure that you are always prepared for a successful audit.  

Vnum supplies the latter, the platform, which helps inspire the former, the culture.