How to boost your audit infrastructure in 5 proven steps
Audit teams are facing mounting challenges and mismatched expectations. On the one hand, they are expected by leadership to provide strategic, insightful guidance on the organisation’s audit status at any given moment. On the other hand, they need to be on top of risks, be aware of regulations, and ensure that the audit infrastructure remains intact.
Audit teams are expected to keep up with increasing manual tasks, sapping hours of effort at a time and having to use multiple systems with no integration.
What problems do audit teams face?
As audit teams implement the use of technology into their audit infrastructure more and more, the biggest problem they face is fragmentation. Siloed systems – systems that don’t “talk” to each other, keeping data in separate pockets – create room for error, cause teams to hunt down information trapped in spreadsheets, and make reporting a nightmare. Too often, we see the emergence of “dark data”: data that is impossible to search, reference, or access.
This, along with leadership expecting in-depth visibility and effective reporting, creates the perfect storm for teams to become overwhelmed and overworked. Additionally, the systems used are too often static, making them unable to keep up with evolving risks like cybersecurity, sustainability, and more.
5 key steps to building an optimised audit infrastructure
What is the key to balancing expanding strategic responsibilities and ensuring the internal audit function remains intact? The answer is levelling up your organisation’s infrastructure. An optimised audit infrastructure enables audit teams to operate within a data-driven environment, creating the ideal conditions for accurate reporting to leadership. This allows audit teams to focus on their core strengths – providing forward-thinking, in-depth insights. Here are the 5 steps to building an optimised audit infrastructure:
- Centralise processes for greater clarity: Step 1 is breaking down detrimental silos by introducing unified audit management platforms into your audit infrastructure
- Automate processes to conduct more audits in less time: Step 2 is automating workflows, making use of industry best practices, and freeing up valuable time so teams can act strategically instead of being weighed down by manual tasks.
- Provide meaningful insights to leadership: With central access to data and resources and more time to analyse reports, step 3 is to ensure your audit committee or leadership receives the oversight they require to make data-driven decisions.
- Establish processes that provide continuous assurance: Step 4 is transforming your audit infrastructure from static to dynamic, creating the conditions for continuous assurance and creating processes for issues that arise.
- Give leadership the risk-based insights they crave: With a unified platform in place, automated workflows, analytics, and dashboards now part of the audit infrastructure, the final step is to paint a clear picture of internal audit findings to leadership, successfully positioning audit teams as strategic advisors.
From identifying problems to solving them: transforming internal audit
Your audit team deserves to achieve next-level efficiency and strategic insight. Fill in the form and download the ebook “Internal Audit’s Expanding Scope: A Checklist” to dive deeper into the five steps and transform your internal audit function into a proactive, strategic partner that delivers clear, actionable insights for informed decision-making.
And after you read the checklist…
Read the 6 Challenges of Bringing Analytics Into Audit. Get a clear picture of the role of technology in today’s modern internal audit function.