Accounting

Auditing Mistakes that May Cost Your Company

calculationThe existing business market is tough enough in today’s global economic climate, without being forced to tackle internal issues that have the potential to undermine your chances of achieving long-term success. Take business compliance, for example, which is a key component across multiple industries and establishes regulations which individual companies must adhere to at all time. To ensure that these responsibilities are being fulfilled, your business will face an annual audit that will have a key bearing on its future.

No while there is no denying that auditing is a hassle, it is also something that every business needs to do at least once a year if it wants to know where it stands. Although auditing is generally considered as something which is supposed to help your company if you follow the correct process, there are some mistakes which have the potential to cost your business considerable amounts of time and money. So that you know how to avoid them, we have created a list of the most disastrous ones:

Set Scope Creep Limitations

As a starting point, imagine that you run a simple retail business. When it comes to auditing, you might think that you will need to allocate a two day window to audit the ground floor of your store. Then imagine that by the start of your second day, you are working slightly faster than you had anticipate so you broaden the scope of your auditing project to cover the first floor. This tactic more often than not ends with failure to complete the project, primarily because it is based on broad expectation rather than definitive logic.

More specifically, it allows your targets to creep from realistic to impossible over a period of time without you realising, resulting in unrealistic shareholder expectations or a horrific work load. To avoid this, you should ensure that your project is not open-ended, and that you set hard limits to the amount of creep in the audit. In a bid to keep your business both compliant and easily manageable, it is important to manage expectations and use predetermined targets as a way of establishing long-term growth.

Remember the Fundamental Reason for the Audit

An audit is not just there to point out the mistakes and flaws in your business's process. In fact, it is there to inform your team how they can improve your company and add value to it. If your audit process doesn't identity areas where you can enhance your business's processes in real terms, then you should ask yourself a simple question: what are the best and worst possible outcomes of a particular auditing test? If there are no up or down shots from the audit, you might be testing the wrong things. You should therefore alter your auditing process to let it highlight areas of your business that can make you more profit.

Follow a Flexible Process

It's essential that your audit is recorded accurately in a way that will highlight where you can make improvements. To ensure this, you should follow a process-driven model which allows you to take responsive action based on data-informed decisions. A great way to make this happen is to invest in a piece of software which will track your assets for you. There are lots of companies offering these software packages, which affords you an ideal opportunity to locate something that is ideal for you.

In Conclusion

So hopefully you are now more aware of some of the most challenging auditing practices, so when it comes to your business's next one you will be able to avoid the most common mistakes and ensure the long-term growth of your firm.

This article was written by Laura on behalf of Assetware Technology, which remains one of the UK’s prime innovators of software solutions.

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