Financial audit support
An intrinsic part of the IT Advisory profession involves looking for opportunities for improvement and greater efficiency. Your organisation’s IT systems offer more options for this than you might think. These systems, such as cloud solutions, APIs, and so on, are full of primary data, electronic evidence of transactions and partially or fully automated control measures. We can use this data to take advantage of the many opportunities it offers to improve the efficiency of annual audits. Based on a thorough investigation, we can explore the options for you. We will also draft a management letter for you, in which we explain where we failed to find opportunities, the reason for this and recommendations for improvement.
The importance of IT audits
Using their knowledge of IT systems, our IT auditors give essential support to auditors in Baker Tilly’s audit practice. Our clients from the audit practice are increasingly having to process their financial and other data in complex, integrated ERP systems, with all kinds of API links, including web services. In the process, these environments are migrating, entirely or in part, to cloud service providers, like Azure, Google and Amazon.
IT audits to support accountants
Checking data across various IT systems requires specific knowledge. Our IT auditors specialise in examining your IT environment to find opportunities and possibilities for the audit approaches used by internal accountants and external auditors alike. How do we go about it? Together with the auditor, we determine what opportunities your IT environment has to offer based on our knowledge of systems, your business and the accountant’s audit approach. This produces what is known as the investigation question.
Systems-based audits
Based on this investigation question, our IT auditors identify which internal control measures are either partially or completely automated. For this we combine our expertise in process configuration and management using our specialist knowledge of IT environments. This combination of expertise and knowledge means that we are able to assess the quality of the digital information on behalf of the accountant. Where the quality is not adequate for application in the audit approach, we will also draft a management letter for you, in which we explain the reason for this and give recommendations for improvement.
Data-driven audits
As well as primary data and automated controls, your system also stores electronic evidence of transactions. Sometimes investigating this data directly by means of various analyses can be a very efficient and effective way to better understand your operational processes and the financial flows in your organisation. We use our data factory and custom scripting for this type of investigation.
The data factory processes the relevant operational and financial data to create useful analysis dashboards for our accountants. This innovative method gives us immediate insights into our clients’ data flows and processing, so that we can understand how the organisation operates. You and your organisation can then use these options to take your internal management information and control to the next level.
