Building Trust Into Your Audit

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

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

are often built on antiquated technology and are no longer fit for purpose.

Connected platforms create a single paradigm for teams to work from – meaning that everyone is working from the same data, which ultimately cascades through versions and formats automatically, driving greater speed, visibility, and improving productivity while reducing time wastage and – critically – risk.

How Alcon streamlined its audit process

Alcon – the $7bn world leader in eye care, whose 20,000 employees serve customers in over 140 countries – has reimagined its auditing processes to deliver real-time reporting from one single source of truth across the business.

After its separation from Novartis nearly 18 months ago, the organisation was tasked with building many of its processes from scratch, including auditing. The business had the option of leveraging the systems existing within its parent company, but leaders felt the parent company was reliant on many older, legacy systems. Many of those applications required ‘workarounds’. Teams were taking data and building bespoke Excel spreadsheets. Work was being duplicated. Data sprawl was occurring and there was no single source of truth across the organisation.

Alcon needed a fresh start. As part of a broader move towards cloud-native SaaS deployments, Alcon opted to deploy a dedicated software-as-a-service connected platform to streamline its audit process.

Taking all of the data, reports and information and building it into the platform enabled Alcon to standardise reporting globally. For an organisation of its size – with contributors across the globe – the ability to bring everything into one place was critical. What was once time-consuming, potentially error-prone, human-created SharePoint documents, is now a streamlined, automated, trusted process: a modernised, tech-enabled audit process.

Evolving standards and regulatory requirements have increased pressure on SOX, audit, and ERM teams to find efficiencies, lower the cost of compliance, and coordinate risk strategies. The ability to publish accurate and timely reports will help organisations continue to build credibility with customers, as well as streamlining their own processes – saving time and resources.

Financial – as well as non-financial – reporting is a topic high on many boardroom agendas, with auditing very much under consideration. By deploying a truly connected platform, that ensures you’re making reporting decisions based on a single source of truth, you can have real confidence in the robustness of your reporting, ensuring both accuracy and compliance with industry regulations.

Ernest Anunciacion, Director of Product, Workiva

Source: 1 https://www.blackline.com/blog/finance-performancemanagement/mistrust-in-the-numbers/ 2 https://www.alcon.com/?_ ga=2.143910197.1443962223.16000905142048546434.1600090514 3 https://www.novartis.com/news/media-releases/novartisplans-alcon-spin-april-9-2019