What is an Audit Management System?

An audit management system is a combination of software applications, IT systems, and personnel workflows that significantly reduce the time and effort necessary for an organization to conduct an external or internal audit.

This is a good idea, because audits have become increasingly complex over the years. Moreover, many corporate compliance obligations require your company to undergo some time of audit – so it’s quite likely that in any given year, your business is undergoing multiple audits at the same time.

This puts huge demands on your employees’ time, so the more efficiently you can manage the audit process, the better. Audit management software can be invaluable to achieve that goal.

What Is Audit Management Software?

Audit management software assures that companies implement board-approved audit directives. For example, such software can streamline and organize the audit planning process or help various teams collaborate across your enterprise to collect evidence or test internal controls. Audit management software also provides standards-driven audit checklists to keep your audit work aligned with regulatory compliance requirements.

Most audit software can integrate with existing document control systems, enabling users to find and access any necessary audit program documentation. Last but not least, audit software can provide an end-to-end audit trail for all previous audits conducted within the organization, keeping an historical record of audit findings and remediation actions suggested at earlier risk assessments.

Why Is Audit Management Software Important?

Conducting audit fieldwork and compiling all audit work papers in an organized fashion can be challenging. Three advantages emerge when using audit software for compliance management that can ease the burden on your audit team.

Automated Audit Activities

Audit management platforms allow you to automate many activities that would otherwise be tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. For example, dashboards can provide much-needed visibility into transactions or operations. Templates can kickstart your audit plan into quick action. With all audit work preserved in one centralized location, you can initiate audit workflows more quickly to collect real-time evidence across devices (including mobile devices).

Most audit management platforms these days are cloud-based, which means you are not chained to a single device or network to be able to conduct your audit activities, including follow-ups for specific processes. It also means you can automate the document collection and verification process for validating documents behind the scenes instead of spending time and manual effort.

Better Quality and Excellence in Audit Activities

Since audit management software has ready-made templates and workflows for every regulatory and compliance scenario, you can now concentrate on more important activities, especially for an internal audit: conducting a comprehensive risk assessment and finding areas of nonconformance, without any loose ends or knowledge gaps.

In addition, by using audit management software, you can provide your team with a consistent methodology that they can follow to report audit observations instead of spending time gathering audit evidence manually.

Increases Speed of Audit Analysis and Reporting

Once the repetitive, administrative tasks for collecting documents and reporting observations are handled, you can spend your time preparing the proper documentation for every compliance mandate and providing an audit trail for recommendations defined in previous audits.

Lastly, your audit team can customize the reporting in a user-friendly and compelling visualization instead of preparing data-intensive reports. That allows your leadership and related stakeholders to interpret the audit findings easily and to make better decisions.

Auditing Made Easy With ROAR

The RiskOptics ROAR Platform can help your team go from tedious manual audit planning and processes to an easier, optimized way to stay compliant. ROAR frees up your teams from the intensive manual effort and helps you to automate your audit workflows with prebuilt requests and integrations to keep your entire team on track.

It also improves your risk posture by connecting your risk and compliance program requirements in one platform. As a result, you’ll gain the dual benefits of strengthening your compliance efforts and improving your risk mitigation ability, while spending less effort on both!

The ROAR platform allows you to leverage expert-built content libraries for more than 20 regulatory and statutory frameworks, which can save your team from tremendous fatigue in planning and maintaining compliance with these standards.

Schedule a ROAR demo today to understand how your organization can stay compliant and secure.