How to make your audit more efficient
It’s impossible for any team in any industry to be 100% efficient—after all, we’re people not robots. But glaring inefficiencies in your accounting practice will leave your team dissatisfied and burnt out—not to mention the time and money you’re losing as a business.
To , we need to start at the beginning by diagnosing what might be going wrong.
Some of the main inefficiencies you may recognise in your practice include:
- Waiting on other parties: Perhaps the most frustrating part of an audit, waiting on other parties is not only inefficient but also beyond your control. When waiting for bank confirmations it can take weeks.
- Coordination challenges: Coordination and communication are central pillars for audit success, particularly in large or dispersed organisations. When communication breaks down, this can result in duplication of effort, miscommunication, and delays—particularly if your software isn’t talking to everyone else’s.
- Repetitive manual tasks: Audits involve many manual tasks which are repetitive and monotonous, and therefore prone to human error. With so many processes and so many data to deal with, it can be hard to get everything right.
- Manual data collection: Like repetitive tasks, manual data collection during audit can become extremely time consuming, and when compiling from different sources it leaves your work prone to duplication and error.
How can accountants create a smooth audit?
Let’s take those practice inefficiencies and see what accountants can do to resolve them.
Waiting on other parties
One of the most frustrating steps in an audit is when you’re waiting for bank confirmations from clients, but they’re taking a while to get back to you and validate their account. How can this be solved? Bank confirmation software can take your process from weeks to minutes through automation.
Technology such as open banking enables you to quickly confirm details, while blockchain ensures security and the immutability of your audit trail.
Coordination challenges
The solution to systems—whether it’s of people or software—that aren’t talking to one another, is integration. This means getting everyone on the same page, whether it’s through cloud accounting that ensures everyone is looking at the same data with real-time updates, or a unified and integrated system that allows people to save time and errors, or both. Connecting your teams and your tech is key.
Repetitive manual tasks
Automation offers a simple solution to repetitive manual tasks during an audit. Embrace digital transformation within your practice and utilise software solutions that enable you to do your job quickly and easily, freeing up your time to focus on value-add services such as consultancy.
Manual data collection
Resources & Whitepapers
Accounting Software The power of customisation in accounting systems
Once again, technology offers a simple solution to manual data collection. Find solutions that can help you reduce paperwork, customise your workflow, and increase quality control instead of inputting everything manually.
Optimise your audit with fast bank confirmations.
UK bank confirmations play a central role in the audit process, but they don’t need to take weeks. Instead, reducing them to a matter of minutes increases the efficiency of your audit. Open banking offers a cost-effective solution as you can quickly share financial information between apps and businesses. Easily work with clients to validate their accounts, without the need for lengthy email back-and-forths and potential data breaches.
While it remains impossible for us to reach a robot-level of 100% efficiency, technology can help us automate the manual and repetitive tasks, freeing up our time to focus on what we do best: build human relationships.
