Data review is a necessary evil in audit and accounting. All the entries need to match the supporting business process documentation, but modern business processes can be complex, and today’s processes create volumes of data that can be hard to manually review during an audit. And without a way to review all that data, audit quality and completeness will continue to slip.
With audit failures on the rise, the public and audit committees are demanding more from their selected audit firms. Finance officers, on the other hand, view audits as a necessary evil, one done ideally at the lowest cost and with minimal disruption to their business operations.
A balance needs to be struck and how corporate data is managed and accessed is going to be the deciding factor.
Enter the idea of data-as-a-deliverable.
Rather than viewing data solely as the burden of proof during the audit, a data-as-a-deliverable approach empowers both the enterprise and the audit firms with the option to manage data more intelligently to reduce the burden on auditors, offer additional services, and successfully implement advanced technologies.
Understanding Data-as-a-Deliverable
Data-as-a-deliverable means that audit firms treat source data, as well as the insights and intelligence derived from data, as a central and tangible product that has value to both the firm and its clients.
By understanding data and its analytical byproducts as a core asset, firms can offer more than just a traditional audit report. The structured, well-organized, and actionable data insights created during the audit process can be used by clients to enhance their operations, improve strategic decision-making, and better manage risk.
Data-as-a-deliverable transforms the role of the auditor from being a retrospective reviewer of historical transactions into a forward-looking, trusted advisor who supports the client’s strategic objectives.
Reducing the Burden On Auditors
The volume of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data has exploded in recent years, with client data often held in multiple formats and spread across multiple systems.
Auditors, however, are constrained by the time, cost, and resources required to read, review, and extract insights. They are limited by how much data they can review before the deadline, impacting their ability to deliver quality and complete audits.
Treating data as a deliverable helps to alter the view of the audit process in the eyes of its stakeholders and allows auditors to be viewed as partners in enriching corporate data.
By establishing a consistent data structure and leveraging a fully contextualized data lake, audit firms can automate much of the data collection, preparation, and review process. This automation frees up auditors to spend less time on low-value tasks and more time analyzing complex trends, identifying and verifying key areas of risk, and providing recommendations that align with the client’s business goals.
The result is better audit outcomes with with greater assurance, all without increasing the effort of the audit.
Providing Greater Value to Clients
In today’s competitive, data-driven market, clients face changing regulatory requirements, complex business environments, and heightened risks.
They expect audit firms to build out their technologies and leverage data more effectively. They want auditors to not only ensure compliance but also to help streamline the compliance process and provide more timely updates than the typical quarterly or annual assessments.
A data-as-a-deliverable approach opens the door for audit firms to offer a wider range of advisory services such as business consultancy and performance optimization. Audits become not just a regulatory necessity but an opportunity to gain deeper insights that can add real business value.
Insights can be used to proactively manage risk, identify inefficiencies in a client’s processes, or make stronger and more data-driven strategic decisions. They help firms attract new clients and build stronger and more lasting relationships with clients who see them as a strategic partner rather than just a necessary service provider.
For example, the firm could provide the client not only with the audit report but also with a dashboard and predictive model that identifies spending patterns, flags potential areas of risks, forecasts cash flow, or predicts future inventory requirements.
Implementing Advanced Technologies
Audit firms are rapidly moving to embrace software tools and advanced technologies that improve efficiency, reduce costs, and facilitate higher-quality audits.
However, in their excitement, many firms have skipped directly to implementing these technologies without putting the necessary data management platform in place.
As a result, they are stuck with a complex mix of one-off solutions that were brought in to solve a specific business problem but do not integrate with the rest of the technology stack.
Adopting a data-as-a-deliverable mindset ensures that audit firms have the proper foundations in place to successfully adopt advanced technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), large language models (LLMs), and data analytics. These technologies rely on access to high-quality, well-organized, and fully contextualized data to operate in a trustworthy manner.
For example, LLMs will struggle to identify relevant information and return a reliable output if unstructured client communications are not properly tagged and categorized into a single, unified system.
As a result, auditors are left to manually link data before it can be processed by AI tools and then verify the output. The added time and labour needed for these tasks end up lessening the benefits that the AI tools were intended to provide.
Letting the Data Tell the Story
Data-as-a-deliverable allows audit firms to transform the structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data available to them into useful information. It is an approach that lets the data speak for itself by making the trends, patterns, and insights available to both audit firms and their clients.
Instead of seeing data as just a tool for the audit, data becomes a critical asset that transforms the role of the audit firm. With this mindset and the right platforms in place, firms can streamline data management, reduce the burden on auditors, and provide greater value to clients at all stages of the engagement.
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