Protecting Yourself During An Advisor Audit

How does your team ensure that emails, documents, content, communications can easily be retrieved if and when necessary? Would it be stressful trying to track down all the emails, files, conversations and log of everything that happened related to that piece of content? Instead, the process could be stress-free if there was an automated archiving system in place. There would be no worry or stress because knowing all the content, the compliance reviews, and external content have all been captured and can be found with high accuracy.

What is Auditing?

Auditing is the process of collecting and examining an organization’s (or individual’s) records and content. This process is to determinate the information is both accurate and in accordance with any rules, regulations, and laws. Internal audits are conducted by internal employees to examine records and are aimed to improve internal processes such as operations, controls, risk management, and governance. External audits are performed by auditors from outside an organization to provide an independent opinion.

Benefits of Performing an Audit

Ultimately, the benefit of performing an internal audit is the protection of assets and reducing exposure to risk. Other key benefits of conducting an internal audit are:

•    Improving efficiency in the process
•    Ensuring compliance
•    The scope of the audit is defined by internal stakeholders
•    Reports are presented to internal stakeholders ensuring a level of privacy
•    Establishes monitoring procedures
•    Identifies redundancies
•    Increases accountability
•    Can serve as an early detection system, allowing for timely corrections of issues.

Moving into Digital

The traditional internal audit process is both time consuming and is susceptible to errors. The typical workflow begins with the auditor collecting data. This is what happens when an internal audit takes place

• Manually search through raw data such as emails, documents, spreadsheets, for the information required or submit a request for that information. This manual search brings productivity to a halt as it is very time intensive and becomes stressful because information may not be easily found or is missing entirely.
• When submitting a request for information, the request will take days even weeks to pull the data. Once the data is pulled, it may still be in its raw form, not in a format that can easily be reviewed.
• The auditor would need to sort through mountains of data or have it been organized into a report which takes even more time
• Finally, with all this data and the sort time frame caused by all the effort spent gathering, the auditor will get stuck in comparing raw figures rather than taking a more analytical approach and providing valuable strategy and insight.

With a modern platform, all the archived data is found in one user-friendly place that allows for accuracy in what the auditor is searching for. Reducing the turnaround time for information gathering allows the auditor to examine the raw data, and have the time to extract valuable insights and develop strategies.

Find out more about Digital Archiving, Veriday’s latest Digital Agent Solution.