What Is an Internal Audit Software?
An internal audit software allows audit teams to plan and manage internal audits successfully.
Lumiform’s audit app, for instance, helps auditors do their job anytime and everywhere. The app also has features that allow you to get audit results, create reports, and send them to your team members. You can try Lumiform’s internal audit software for free and cut audit time by half.
The process is simple. Quickly create custom audit forms and report templates, conduct audits via app whether you are online or offline, solve uncovered issues, track the corrective process, view and share reports, and access data analytics to identify areas that require improvement.
Organizations must perform regular Internal audits. Auditing your departments can help:
- Improve the organization’s internal control management
- Improve internal strategic planning by identifying gaps, areas for improvement, and non-compliance
- Identify inefficiencies within the organization and provide recommendations for improvement
- Meet regulatory or compliance audits by serving as an Early Warning System, enabling you to identify and resolve deficiencies before an external audit occurs
- Boosts accountability within the organization
Internal audit automation is an excellent way to make your internal audits more efficient. And that is the reason you need internal audit software. It’s a modern internal audit tool that simplifies your internal audit process. Ultimately, it can improve the quality of your internal audits, boost employee productivity, reduce costs, and make your organization more resilient.
Some important features to look for in an internal audit app are:
- Audit planning
- Customizable audit forms
- Deadline-setting and progress-tracking
- Automated reporting
- Web-based so you can send reports to team members
What Are the 4 Types of Internal Audits?
The four types of internal audits are compliance audits, operational audits, financial audits, and information technology audits. They examine various business systems.
- A compliance audit analyzes your organization’s compliance with regulations, laws, policies, processes, contracts, or procedures that govern the system being audited.
- An operational audit reviews internal controls of procedures and processes to make your operation more efficient and effective.
- A financial audit evaluates the financial statements of your organization to ensure that your financial records are accurate.
- An information technology audit examines your organization’s IT infrastructure, operating systems, databases, and applications.
How Do You Perform a Successful Internal Audit?
The right internal audit software helps you perform a successful internal audit. It has features that assist you in all of the eight steps necessary for an effective internal audit. What are those eight steps?
1. Step: Identify the Specific Areas You Must Audit
It’s not practical to audit all processes in your organization. You must identify which areas need auditing. These areas are the ones that can help your organization achieve its goals and experience real growth.
As a case in point, auditing your financial activities can help you spend your money wisely and enjoy substantial earnings.
If your organization can identify key areas that will benefit from an internal audit, your efforts will be worthy. You will not waste time and resources on planning, scheduling, performing, and analyzing the audits.
Your internal audits will cause significant improvements if done efficiently and effectively. Being clear about the areas that need auditing is key to achieving your desired outcome.
2. Step: Decide How Often to Perform the Audit
How often you conduct internal audits is an important matter. Your internal audit must be well-timed for it to be successful. Some business processes require annual audits, and some audits may need to be done more often to ensure consistent results.
In particular, quality control audits must be done daily, while financial audits can be done quarterly. As previously mentioned, you must be clear about the areas covered by your internal audit to make an informed decision regarding your audit schedule. There are numerous internal audit tools like Lumiform that can help you schedule your internal audits.
3. Step: Plan and Schedule the Audits
The next step is planning and scheduling your internal audits. Planning and scheduling your audits in advance lets you avoid timetable clashes. Having a defined schedule ensures that the right team members are available when needed during the conduct of an audit. Take advantage of free internal audit tools that help team members plan their tasks accordingly.
Scheduling your audits guarantees that you cover all processes that require an internal audit. Lumiform’s internal audit app is packed with features that help you schedule the entire internal audit in advance so that all activities are done on time.
4. Step: Notify the People Involved
Common courtesy dictates that you must notify all people involved in the upcoming audit. This practice allows all the departments to prepare and have the necessary documents and materials ready.
Unless it is a surprise internal audit due to suspicious activities, your employees have the right to know about the company’s activities. They must not feel that auditors are to be feared. Giving your team the lowdown about the audit process will let them understand the value of this activity and how it can contribute to the organization’s success.
Notifying the people involved in your internal audit is easy if you use an internal audit management software like Lumiform. The app notifies its users when inspections or tasks are due. You can also set it so that a supervisor gets a text or email as soon as an inspection becomes overdue.
5. Step: Prepare the Audit Checklist and Execute Audit
Prepare your audit checklist and ask the right questions to the right people at the right time. Lumiform has a built-in audit checklist maker so you can prepare and execute your audit easily.
The good news for auditors is that there are audit templates that can cut your audit planning time in half. You can customize these forms to fit your organization or industry.
6. Step: Record and Analyze Audit Findings
After performing the audit, you can record and analyze the data to create a report that identifies the processes that are working and the ones that need improvements. You can do these tasks efficiently with internal audit management software.
7. Step: Investigate to Develop and Implement Action Plans
You need to perform an internal audit to identify improvement areas. Effective issue management is the core goal of internal audits. An excellent internal audit app must have an issue management feature so you can raise issues, develop an action plan, and implement such a plan easily.
8. Step: Perform Audit Follow-Ups
Audit follow-ups help you measure the efficacy of your action plan. It’s as important as planning, scheduling, and performing the internal audit. After identifying improvement areas and assigning corrective actions to team members, you must track the troubleshooting status. Lumiform allows you to chat with teammates in-app so you can collaborate on a solution to a certain issue.
Why Do You Need an Internal Audit Software?
Internal audit software can help you perform easily and conveniently all of the above-enumerated steps. It is an internal audit tool that’s worth itself in gold. It helps you save time and avoid wasted efforts and resources.
An efficient, organized and streamlined internal audit process makes sure that your organization is compliant with industry standards and best practices. So, get a robust internal audit management software that can help your business succeed because you are consistently providing top quality products or services to your customers.