Are you knee-deep in the trenches of audit prep? If so, this audit survival guide is for you.
We’ve rounded up the best resources on navigating audit season in one place to help you get through this stressful time of year smoothly and in one piece. Dive in!
How to prepare for audit season with automation and AI (Webinar)
If you’ve ever:
- Painstakingly pieced together transaction journeys for audit samples
- Struggled to aggregate data from across many different, fragmented sources
- Managed Excel files so big they take 10 minutes to load
… then this webinar is for you.
We partnered with CFO Dive and interviewed seasoned finance leaders to hear how you can better prepare for finance season with automation and AI.
Tune in to get expert advice from Sivan Peri, Former VP Finance at Similarweb, Angela Shi, VP Strategic Finance at AiDash, and Kate Reasons, CPA, Director of Accounting and Operations at Revv.
In this session, they discuss their experiences on the following topics:
- Why your reconciliation processes will make you or break your audit
- How you can simplify and reduce sampling through journal entry automation
- What continuous audit readiness with AI looks like all year round
- Best practices for fintechs, marketplaces, and SaaS companies
Watch now >> How to prepare for audit season with automation and AI (Webinar)
How to dramatically simplify financial audits with automation (with 11 examples)
Audits are rough, no two ways about it, especially when you’re managing complex finance operations. But automating your finance processes can make it infinitely easier to both prepare for audits and manage the process once it’s underway.
In this article, we outline 11 ways automation can change the game for your next audit. For example:
1️⃣ Implement application controls – and reduce sampling! – with automated journal entry creation & posting
Automating the creation and posting of journal entries greatly reduces the risk of error and means the audit team only needs to review the logic and a small number of samples to verify compliance.
2️⃣Achieve SOX compliance by automating the approval flow of journal entry posting and reconciliation review
With an automated finance operations tool, every action is recorded and posted in an automated approval process with an audit log to support. Application controls are always better than manual controls.
3️⃣ Show the full transaction journey from receiving customer funds to merchant payment
Track payment flows from start to finish, making it easy to show an auditor the full loop of how the funds originated and were settled from start to finish – including all the data points outside your ERP.
Read the rest of the article >> 11 ways automation can change the game for your next audit
10 things you can do today to make your audit go smoothly
Audit season is upon us. If that puts a big ball of dread in the pit of your stomach, you’re not alone.
Sivan Peri, former VP Finance at SimilarWeb, has seen it all during her years as an auditor, controller, and finance executive at a publicly traded company.
We teamed up with Sivan to create an audit readiness guide for your accounting team so you can face your next audit head-on and with confidence.
Here are some concrete tips that you and your team can implement today:
1️⃣ Do not delay the audit, and if you can, request a pre-audit
It’s human nature to procrastinate, but delaying your audit will make it much, much harder.
If you can, do a pre-audit as early as November so that you can do most of the heavy lifting of the audit – pulling info, preparing the sampling, and organization documentation – already during Q4.
2️⃣ Schedule an early kick-off meeting with your auditors to get aligned
As Murphy’s Law would have it, the hardest questions and nastiest surprises often come up at the end of the audit.
To avoid this, schedule an early kick-off meeting with your auditors to discuss any major company changes or business trends that could impact your accounting & reporting requirements.
3️⃣ Get your books in order with special attention to bank reconciliations
- Record journal entries in as much detail as possible
- Keep an updated list of all your bank accounts
- Cross-check reconciliations across all your major accounts
- Try to minimize the number of unknown transactions that are recorded against “general” on your deposited account
Read the rest >> 10 things you can do today to make your audit go smoothly
10 finance cheat sheets to help you navigate audit season
Who doesn't love a good cheat sheet roundup?
We rounded up 10 of the best resources on LinkedIn created by some of the brightest and best finance leaders in the space to help you prepare for and navigate audits without stress.
Some highlights include:
- Financial audit 101
- 5 AI use cases for audit you should implement right now
- Resolving audit observations
Check it out >>10 finance cheat sheets to help you navigate audit season
A meditation for accounting: Peace of Mind (courtesy of FloQast)
Finally, sometimes you just gotta breathe through it.
The geniuses over at FloQast put together a 12-minute guided meditation to help busy finance professionals like you take some time to center yourself, think about your priorities, and understand that at the end of the day, you need to focus on you.
Let's meditate >> A meditation for accounting: Peace of Mind
What other resources would you add to this survival guide?
