Just like any project, a successful audit starts with good quality and timely planning.

Effective planning and communication with your auditors is key to a successful and robust audit process.  Keep the lines of communication open with your auditors all year long—don’t wait until the year-end. It’s important to maintain regular communication with your auditors throughout the financial year, staying up to date on business issues and reporting requirements.

Your audit team needs to stay updated on any big changes in your business throughout the year. This way, they can give you a heads-up on potential risks and help you prepare for the year-end audit, with these in mind. Audit regulations are continuously getting tougher, and that means more work for both the audit team and clients. Your auditor should keep you in the loop about new rules that might impact your business and let you know if you’ll need to prep extra info for the audit.

Logistics
In a post-pandemic world, we’ve become accustomed to working remotely and interacting electronically. Although this approach does have its benefits, some things just work better face-to-face, especially for more complex issues.

A mix of remote and in-person audits tends to strike the best balance between efficiency and quality. Make sure to discuss this with your audit team when planning.

Timetable
As part of our audit planning work, we issue clients with a Planning Report, outlining practicalities such as our audit approach and timetable, as well as the significant risk areas we have identified during the course of our initial discussions with management.

The audit schedule is agreed upon by both parties and helps keep things on track with other service providers, like tax advisors and bookkeepers. Having all necessary info ready during key audit dates is crucial. Our deliverables tool – Inflo, syncs with the agreed timeline and sets due dates for each audit request. It’s color-coded, making it easy for everyone to see the status. Plus, you can use it to ask questions in real time.

Getting ahead
We get it—the amount of info you need to gather for an audit can be overwhelming. With this in mind it’s useful to consider which areas can be addressed before the year end.

Working on assessing key estimates and judgements prior to the year end is a good way to spread this workload. Certain areas can be reviewed and prepared prior to the audit process and frontloaded, such as:

• Going Concern assessment including forecast cashflows up 12 months post the expected signing date of the financial statements. This is usually a period up to 21 months after the year end.
• Impairment assessments of investments and intangible assets.
• Technical papers on treatment of any key acquisitions or disposals during the period.
• If practical, we can also complete and interim audit work, ensuring that a portion of the income statement has been reviewed prior to the period end.

There are also specific areas of audit work that can be completed pre-year end in an interim review to reduce the pressure on information requests during the key audit dates, these include:

• Acquisition accounting review for any transactions completed pre-year end;
• Payroll review, year to date;
• Revenue testing year to date;
• Changes to business processes and implemented controls; and
• Accounts disclosure reviews such as operating leases.

Always reach out to your audit manager to discuss your audit needs and plan for the upcoming audit season. For further advice or support with any of the above, get in touch with Marcus Webb, Financial Services Senior Manager.