Financial audit: Would digitization make a difference?
30% of employee time is spent in maintaining paper documents and yet this time used productively can increase a company’s revenue and also reduce costs.
All companies have financial departments and thus the necessity of financial audits. Financial audit assists in providing clarity to the business by identifying how well internal controls and financial reporting are working and which process improvements should be given priority.
Financial audits can be time consuming, tedious and nerve wracking. Searching for documents and sorting them out as per the requirements of the auditor takes a lot of time. The more the daily transactions being handled within a company the more the work involved.
Searching for and sorting documents as per the auditors requirements can take time if the documents are in paper format. The auditor also needs time to go through your accounting documents even if they are well organized. The paper documents slows down the audit process and can be very frustrating.
Staff time
A number of staff have to stop the productive work they are doing and assist in searching and identifying the right documents. The process forces them to go searching for the required documents in the filing cabinets and maybe also in the stores. This can take a number of hours if not days or even weeks.
What if the documents are in digital format?
The documents in digital format would speed up the audit process of this company and save them time and minimize frustrations. The auditor would have a secured link enabling him to access the financial documents digitally. At the end of every year the auditor can easily access these documents by just a click of a button. The digital books can be organized, factual and easy to understand. This makes all business documents searchable in a few clicks making it easy for the auditors to search for by criteria such as supplier name, product type, amount, or date or full text search.
Data is accessible whenever they require them without delay. The other staff will not also stop their work to assist in document search. Not only is time saved but also productivity will improve. Audit process will also be faster and data more accurate. That would be a great place to work.