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Audit · 1 min read

Staying audit-ready all year, not just in audit season

The businesses that find audits painless are not lucky. They are doing five unremarkable things every month.

Audit season is only stressful when the year has been left to accumulate. The organisations that get through it quickly treat readiness as a monthly habit rather than an annual project.

First: reconcile bank accounts every month, without exception. An unreconciled bank account is the single most common reason an audit stalls. Second: keep source documents attached to transactions as they are entered, not retrieved from a drawer eleven months later.

Third: close each month properly and do not reopen it. Fourth: maintain a fixed asset register that is actually updated when things are bought, sold or written off. Fifth: document the approvals — who authorised what, and on what basis.

None of these are sophisticated. Together they are the difference between an audit that takes two weeks and one that takes two months.

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