Using Collaboration Tools for Financial Audits

Audit season is rarely fun (no offense to any auditors reading this) for any company, and usually even less so for small finance teams or one-man shops in expansion stage growth companies. Tracking down source documents, compiling workpapers, sending documents and files to auditors, keeping track of revisions and open items…it can be extremely time-consuming for even the most organized finance team.

With today’s technology, it’s increasingly amazing to me that more small companies don’t take advantage of collaboration and document storage tools to inject some efficiencies into this process.  Many more-established and larger organizations have already adopted electronic audit packages and collaboration tools as part of their best practice approach to managing their annual audits and quarterly reviews.  Smaller companies and expansion stage companies can realize the same benefits quite easily and without a lot of expense. 

One of our expansion stage portfolio companies, Central Desktop, decided to use their own collaboration tools to assist in the organization and management of their very first financial audit this year. They also gave access to the workspace to their external auditors, and used the application as a collaboration and document sharing tool. The benefits were immediate…more efficiency and organization for both the Central Desktop team and the audit team. The number of redundant requests for schedules and documents was minimal (everyone on the teams had access to the same schedules and supporting documents), the audit partner could log in to the workspace at his convenience and see the progress of the fieldwork at a glance, the teams could collaborate directly in the workspace rather than send emails back and forth, and there was also no need to send large electronic files over email.

If your company hasn’t yet adopted this best practice, I would highly recommend it…it will most likely eliminate many hours of inefficiency from both your internal prep as well as your auditors’ billable hours (which should result in lower fees and over-runs). If you don’t know where to start, check out Central Desktop’s solution at www.centraldesktop.com.