FINANCE
TRUST AUDIT PROCESS
Auditing hasn’t been far from the news agenda in recent months, with many high profile stories demonstrating the negative ramifications of external audit processes not serving their purpose. For businesses across the globe today, financial and non-financial reporting has certainly come under the microscope. Increasing regulatory requirements and misreporting has made headlines, and it’s never been more important for businesses to ensure their reporting processes fall in line with legislative standards. If not, they risk both reputational and financial fall out. Yet when properly executed, the audit process can be a positive tool for reaffirming business performance, compliance and investment potential. The audit challenge Auditors are information rich and data 60
hungry. They need access to all kinds of information – from financial to procedural and beyond. In large organisations, gathering this type of intelligence is not only a costly, manual, and time-consuming task, it’s also prone to errors and duplication, and can even be exploited. Those teams who make up an organisation’s line of defence – whether they’re business and process owners, compliance professionals, or part of the internal audit team – have historically operated in siloes, which has created redundancies and inaccuracies across companies. Not only are they responsible for gathering a plethora of information for external use, they’re also tasked with keeping a close eye on what’s going on elsewhere in the business. This is difficult to achieve with standard desktop tools, which make sharing and collaborating inefficient and opaque.
Many companies are in this institutional chaos – in which audit and reporting processes are essentially a spaghetti pot of document versions, owners, and changes, which is ultimately leaving companies exposed to errors and risk. The need for real-time access to reliable data is essential for confident business decisions. Yet nearly 70% of organisations have made a significant decision based on inaccurate financial data. A connected solution If organisations are going to build strong customer relationships based on a foundation of trust, this figure must change. Those running audit processes today are therefore looking for advanced softwareas-a-service (SaaS) solutions to provide all stakeholders the same access to required functionalities. While audit providers have been around for as many as 30 years, they
