An audit is an inspection of your organisation’s financial reports, systems and processes. This is to ensure that the correct procedures are being followed and you are free from impending risk. Auditing process also helps you highlight any discrepancies between your policies and your procedures. i.e. Auditing helps you align what you should be doing with what you are actually doing.
One of the biggest challenges of auditing is that auditors are known for requesting for a lot of documents that you might think are irrelevant. If you rely on manual processes to manage your documents, you would have a little hiccup tracking all your documents because they would be scattered in different places. You would agree with me that manually managing documents is really cumbersome and it requires lots of time and effort and resources. What do you think will happen to your business if a document had been misfiled or lost and was inaccessible to you and your auditors? Bad processes or employees not following the correct procedures could result in non-compliance. And non-compliance of industry regulations can have a serious business, financial, legal and reputational implications. The introduction of a Document Management system can help you manage your documents, streamline your business processes and provide visibility of compliance actions.
A Document Management system integrates seamlessly with your existing in-house applications and works intelligently ‘behind the scenes’ to link all of your applications together and easily share information between them.
Here are 3 ways in which Document Management can help your company to be audit-ready:
Document Security
With a document management system in place, you don’t have to worry about how to secure your business most important documents. Even after storing those documents you can set user permissions for your staff and control who has access to which documents and how they can use them. So you are sure your documents are in the hands of the right people.
Consistent Procedures
With business rules and workflow in place, you know that the correct procedures are always followed. Escalate approvals and reviews to ensure deadlines are not missed. Alerts will highlight any deviation from the rules automatically. Handle exceptions consistently by creating a separate workflow with its own set of rules. Using Electronic Workflows increase efficiency and accuracy.
Easy Auditing Process
With a document management enabled platform, auditors have secure access to your documents and inspection can be done without any disruption from you or your colleague. With powerful keyword search functions of a Document Management system, documents needed for audits are available in seconds. During the inspection, auditors can simply export any information they need in a digital format, saving everyone time and money.
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