Audit Support Services and Financial Accounting for Reliable Audits

Overview of Audit Support Services and Financial Audit

Audit support services primarily fill a temporary yet essential need—outside experts who can represent the company as a liaison with the auditors. Experts who can jump in and become a part of the team learn the ways and needs of the company quickly and can fill this role seamlessly. This is especially critical for companies seeking financial audit readiness or partnering with a reliable audit firm.

Ideally, they are brought in before the audit process begins; to assess how ready the books and records are to support an audit and prepare for any questions that are likely to arise.

Scope of Work

• Audit support services including interacting with the audit clients for auditing queries
• Rolling forward of electronic audit file on Audit software
• Migration from traditional excel audit file to electronic file
• Performing casting procedures on accounts for internal consistency, mathematical accuracy and agreeing on lead schedules with final accounts
• Reviewing financial statements of companies/charities/trusts
• Check accounts for their compliance with the relevant accounting standards.
• Prepare checklists to report errors to the onshore audit firm to make necessary changes to the financial statements and future accounts.

Types of Audit Support Services: –

When looking into audit and compliance services, experts with specialized skill sets and experience help in anticipation of an audit, during and after an audit, as needed:

Pre-audit reviews:

External audit support services can involve cleaning up the books, and applying an auditor-like viewpoint to your recordkeeping, with the intention of resolving any issues before the actual financial audit. Several benefits can be realized when expert consultants conduct pre-audit reviews, including: –

• No disruption to the audit
• Fewer audit services adjustments
• Less risk of a material weakness

Audit support liaisons:

These consulting experts can touch base with the auditors early on in the process and go through the PBC (or prepared by client) list of schedules and other documents to understand the auditors’ areas of focus and start formulating responses that will meet the auditor’s expectations.

Internal Audit Services:

Completely separate from the support offered for an external financial audit, internal audit services can fill critical needs, such as a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to bring to light both issues and opportunities the company may be missing.

Support for audits of internal controls over financial reporting:

SOX experts can help companies with their risk assessment, materiality, design of controls and testing of operational effectiveness, all in preparation of the first time they will undergo a SOX audit and then assist the company with any questions from their external audit firm.

How Audit support services work

• Gathering information on how a company is operating
• Monitoring & analysing risk assessments and controls of an organization
• Reviewing the company’s compliance with local and federal laws & policies
• Verifying information, making recommendations for improvement, and providing insights on the same
• Following up on the organization’s progress

Benefits of audit support services to organizations

Audit support services is crucial to organization’s success and can transform the practice in the following ways:

1) Takes the tedium out of auditing

With outsourced audit services, you get access to trained, highly qualified, and experienced professionals who will devote their time to processing audit working papers. Hence, there are no more errors or missed deadlines.

2) Save costs:

Cost-cutting is one of the main advantages of outsourcing, and its savings can be substantial. More importantly, you can save a lot of money on the salaries, taxes, office supplies, and infrastructure it takes to hire, train, and retain an in-house team.

4) Better capacity to scale:

Better capacity to scale: Accountants who start their practice and begin their journey with a small client base often run out of work or fail to get new clients. But with the right and timely external audit support, firms can include audit services in their portfolio and improve their capacity to scale effectively.

Key factors of using audit support services include

• Addressing a company’s lack of audit expertise, a common need for companies undergoing a financial audit for the first time.
• Supplementing the bandwidth of an already stretched thin finance team.
• Addressing record keeping that is not “audit ready,” such as completing account reconciliations, preparing technical accounting memos for complex or unusual transactions, and documenting accounting policies.
• Achieving cost efficiencies for the overall audit services.