Impact of Automated Follow-up Audit Process to Scale-up Businesses

Internal Audit refers to a department within an organisation who are assigned the task of providing an unbiased, independent feedback of the systems, organisations, and procedures. An organisation’s management or governing bodies look at Internal Audit to serve as an objective source of information about the organisation’s risks, control environment, operational effectiveness, and compliance to all the standards and framework.

It is the responsibility of an organisation’s internal audit to give independent assurance that the risk management, governance, and internal control procedures are functioning effectively. The internal audit management software assists you in managing all your audit projects and conduct all your risk analysis under a single platform. The internal audit management software allows you to keep track of all your risk initiatives and carry out all your risk assessments using one single platform. It enhances the project’s agility and value by working together in a single location on all aspects of auditing, including planning, fieldwork, and report writing.

The isorobot internal audit management software gives you real-time visibility into the status of your audit plan, reporting issues, and the status of your corrective action plan. To effectively assess risk assessment and eliminate non-conformances, an effective risk assessment approach includes risk assessment, audit, corrective action plan, and closure audit.

Internal Audit Manager

Internal Audit manager solution is in direct conflict with the organisation’s goals and objectives. The Internal Audit Manager examines the guidelines, business frameworks, and ISO standards, in addition to the best practices that are currently included within the best practices library.

The Internal Audit Process

Internal Audit comprises of four stages namely planning, conducting the audit, analysing the results, and following up:

• Planning

During the process of planning, the internal audit team will define the scope and objectives, review guidance specific to audit regulatory standards, policies, and procedures, review the results from previous audits, set a timeline, create an audit plan to be executed, identify the process owners to involve. The audit team will carry out an audit plan throughout this phase.

• Fieldwork

Fieldwork refers to the actual act of conducting an audit. Throughout this stage, the audit team will be implementing the audit plan. This typically entails interviewing key personnel to verify their familiarity with the process and controls, reviewing supporting documentation and artefacts to determine how the controls might be implemented in practice, testing a representative sample of the controls over time, documenting the results, and highlighting any discrepancies or areas for improvement.

• Reporting

During the reporting phase, internal audit management software will be responsible for drafting the audit report. Once the report is ready, the findings should be accompanied by recommendations or feedback that contribute to improve the entire internal auditing process. The process of issuing an internal audit report should include the following steps: drafting the report, reviewing the draught with management to ensure that the findings are accurate, issuing and distributing the final report, and closing out the process.

• Follow-up

Follow-up is the final stage that is usually disregarded and ignored. Conducting a follow-up is crucial to confirm that the recommendations have been put into action to address the findings that were discovered. This process ought to incorporate the necessary follow-up with process owners who are obligated to put the recommendations into action.

What is an Auditee’s Approach to Follow-up and how are Corrective Actions Verified to Ensure Continuous Improvement?

• The Auditor can perform a root-cause analysis, impact analysis and based on this, corrective actions can be taken through the system
• The auditors have the ability to record their findings
• Taking the necessary steps to close out corrective actions is highly critical. Failing to do so will render the entire audit and its results meaningless
• The isorobot internal audit management system will notify the responsible users on the deadline about remedial actions
• If the corrective actions are not closed within the stipulate period, this will be automatically escalated to the higher authorities
• The findings register live status will be useful to auditors as they can see all open findings
• Corrective actions with live status will be beneficial to auditors as they can see the status of corrective actions instead of always waiting for the auditee’s response
• Auditors will be able to follow up through the system
• Advanced dashboards and reports will give auditors and top management insights about findings and corrective actions

isorobot streamlines all the business processes and internal controls with the help of Internal Audit Manager. Therefore, under any circumstances, the advantages of conducting a follow-up using an isorobot internal audit software should never be under-valued. It is a crucial component of an ongoing audit programme and contributes to the process of ensuring that management has taken the proper corrective action. Hence, in the event that problems are not addressed and resolved, the organisation will still become vulnerable as before. Undoubtedly, follow-up audit continues to be an important weapon in the arsenal of the internal audit management programme.