An internal audit will help your company accomplish its strategic goals and help mitigate risk. It will give your business an objective and disciplined approach to assess and enhance the effectiveness of governance, risk management, and internal control processes.
While there are enough business benefits to warrant conducting regular internal audits, there are also regulatory reporting reasons to do so. The last thing you need is for your business to face fines and reputational damage due to non-compliant financial reporting.
Your business can launch an internal audit for any of a number of reasons. Depending on the situation, for instance, your company might decide to perform a compliance audit, financial audit, information technology audit, or operational audit.
While the focus and scope of the audit might change, the goal of any internal audit is to find any problems or verify that things are working correctly.
With the complexity of doing business in the digital era, your internal audit team members need the right auditing skills. That’s one reason cloud-based internal audit reporting is a godsend. The right internal auditing solution can expedite the internal auditing process for your company’s audit team.
With that said, continue reading to learn about three ways internal audits benefit your business.
1. Provides Insight
Your internal audit team is responsible for providing your company with an independent and unbiased perspective. It’s hard to make informed business decisions without the correct information about how your company is really doing. Your internal audit team will find it easier to get a snapshot of your company’s operational performance with the right agile cloud-based reporting tool.
Such a solution will allow you to audit on autopilot. Your internal audit team will obtain better assurance from automated evidence gathering, certification, final engagement reports, and more. One reason it’s essential to deploy the right cloud-based solution for audit reports is that it can adapt to how your internal audit program is currently structured. That will reduce the learning curve and won’t impede productivity or efficiency so your audit team can focus on the task at hand.
2. Improves Operational Efficiency
When you comb over your company’s procedures and policies, your business can get assurance the company is adhering to the implemented procedures and policies. Your company will, through internal reviews, discover whether or not what you’re doing is enough to mitigate the specific risks your company faces.
Again, cloud-based reporting technology can be your friend on this front. When you select the right audit reporting solution, you can keep policies current courtesy of a connected and centralized master index. It’ll make it easier to access and manage content pertaining to standards, policies, procedures, and guidelines for the entire company in a single integrated space you can easily access in the cloud.
3. Ensures Compliance With Regulations and Laws
As was mentioned earlier, conducting routine internal audits will ensure your company complies with all relevant regulations and laws for things like financial statutory reporting. The importance of this can’t be overstated. Businesses don’t want to be associated with service providers who run afoul of the law.
Building and maintaining client trust and avoiding fines connected to non-compliance make internal auditing an essential business practice. When done correctly using the right reporting platform like Workiva, it can also prepare your business for its next external audit.
It’s worth your while to get an internal audit solution that helps your business centralize its risk management strategies and compliance strategy company-wide. The right cloud-based reporting tool can connect people, data, and processes to mitigate risk, boost control, and facilitate insights. You’ll be able to combine otherwise disparate data to deliver the most up-to-date risk and compliance reporting to your company’s stakeholders.
Internal Audits Make Good Business Sense
As you can see, there are many good reasons for your business to conduct internal audits. Whether you want greater insight company-wide, wish to improve operational efficiency, or want to ensure compliance with regulations and laws, internal audits can help.
Your internal audit team will also be better prepared to conduct internal audits if you have the right cloud-based reporting software. There are many internal audit reporting options out there. But that doesn’t mean they’re equal in terms of features and quality. So, ensure you do your due diligence to find the right tool for your company.
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