Steps For A Successful Audit
Internal auditing is a vital activity for every business organization or company. This compulsory activity aims to ensure that your company follows the established rules and regulations to avoid being penalized.
The internal audit procedure must be transparent, efficient, effective, and very ergonomic.
If the thought of preparing for your upcoming audit worries you, you should know that you aren’t the only one experiencing such. Many business owners experience the same feeling whenever the end of the year approaches.
A professional auditor can help you carry out the audit. Accounting firms in Singapore is home to several accountants, and they can help you with this task. Aside from offering auditing services, accountants also offer payroll services.
Here are some professional tips to make sure your auditing process is as smooth as possible.
Tips to help you have a stress-free audit
1. Examine changes in activities
Ensure you keep records of any changes in the activity of the organization to ensure that no detail is left out. Changes such as the initiation of a new program or the discontinuation of a new program, a change in the internal control systems or organizational structure, leadership changes, etc.
Such modifications in the activities of the organization may activate accounting and reporting concerns that should be brought to the knowledge of the auditor during the planning process.
2. Make sure you learn from your mistakes
To pull off a successful audit, you must accumulate enough experience from past errors and audits. You can record stocks of any audit modifications performed in the past, internal control recommendations, or challenges faced during past audits.
Assess the documentation for past issues encountered during an auditing exercise, including plans regarding how they should be tackled. This can kick off an effective self-review that might help you take note of your previous mistakes and ensure you don’t repeat them.
When you call for an auditors meeting, be sure to talk about the shortcomings of the previous year’s audits and measures that could be adopted to prevent such shortcomings from reoccurring.
3. Don’t be clumsy with your data
A well-arranged data is key to a successful audit. When your data aren’t well arranged, you could make some costly mistakes that could render the audit result useless. You can decide to develop a repository audit timetable that can be obtained in the future by the appropriate person.
Create subfolders to keep track of important transaction cycles or categories, like cash, revenue, and receivables, expenses and payables, investments, fixed assets, debts, including other transactions that you feel are quite significant.
It is also advisable that you secure (with passwords) schedules and work papers that hold sensitive information.
See if you can write new reports in your accounting software that could make easy the preparation of some schedules and work papers by automating the process.
4. Ensure you ask questions
There are several audit firms in Singapore that can help you carry out a successful audit.
If peradventure, you get in contact with an auditor from one of these audit firms in Singapore, and the auditor is requesting an item that seems ambiguous, do not hesitate to ask for clarification before the auditing process begins to prevent potential delay and the increment in service fees.
Auditors will be very glad to answer any accounting-related questions you may have for them; it could be questions concerning unusual or infrequent transactions you may need help in accounting for.
You should also be able to challenge any request you aren’t comfortable with and make alternative options at the right time.
5. Carry out a self-review
As soon as all year-end closing entries are initiated, carry out a thorough revision on schedules and work papers to ensure that amounts match with the trial balance.
Take your time and go through the entire financial statements to ensure that they all make sense. Also, scrutinize and update the notes to your financial statements, and make reference to a disclosure checklist to be certain that you have all the necessary information included.
In a Nutshell
Auditing is an activity that ought to be carried out with precision, care, and focus.
A single miscalculation or one left out figure or information might end up ruining the final result of the audit. It is, therefore, important that you provide your auditor with the right information to ensure that the audit becomes successful.
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