Data sits at the core of strong business processes that drive valuable insight and innovation—if it's understood and used correctly.
A strong data foundation greatly enhances existing operations, such as audits, and provides intelligence for continuous improvements aligned with organizational objectives.
Achieving this typically requires a dedicated team of data specialists who find, analyze, and process data, extract pertinent information, and report their findings to decision-makers—unless intelligent automation is implemented.
What is an Intelligent Automation Solution for Auditing?
While manual data processes are common, organizations also have the option to leverage automated systems that utilize intelligent autoamtion.
These systems can rapidly gather, analyze, and process information, enabling quick assessments from top to bottom. They provide a clear overview of relevant metrics based on defined objectives while filtering out irrelevant noise.
An intelligent automation solution for auditing streamlines workflows in areas such as such as test of details, walkthroughs, and other audit procedures. It creates automation for inspections, boosting efficiency, and allowing human talent to focus on analysis, reliable evaluations, and evidence-based decision-making.
Benefits of Intelligent Automation in Auditing
Intelligent automation offers numerous benefits to the field of auditing by combining advanced technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Here are some key benefits of intelligent automation in auditing:
- Accuracy: Automation reduces the risk of human errors that occur during manual data entry or analysis. Intelligent automation tools can accurately and consistently process vast amounts of data, minimizing mistakes and improving the overall accuracy of the audit process.
- Efficiency: Intelligent automation streamlines audit processes by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. This allows auditors to focus on more strategic activities, such as data analysis, risk assessment, and decision-making. By automating data collection, extraction, and analysis, audits can be completed more quickly and efficiently.
- Standardization: Intelligent automation enables the standardization and consistency of audit processes and methodologies. By automating predefined audit procedures, organizations ensure consistent audits across different entities or business units.
6 Must-Have Features of Intelligent Automation Platforms in Audit
- Improves Efficiency: Intelligent audit automation consolidates all necessary tools into a central platform. This boosts the efficiency of audit teams by providing a clear structure for audit procedures, guiding staff, avoiding confusion, and enabling focus on important tasks. It allows audit teams to create more value for the organization.
- Audit Consistency: Moving audit work from documents to a centralized automation platform establishes a structured audit program, ensuring consistency across different audits. This helps teams work smarter and deliver better results.
- Document Support: The best intelligent automation platforms for audit allow users to attach supporting documents to their audits, storing everything securely for future reference. Advanced features like document matching and reconciliation automatically cross-reference information between documents.
- Document Reconciliation: Audit teams need to quickly inspect and reconcile supporting evidence with sample data to verify accuracy. A robust audit intelligent platform automates this process, saving time and improving documentation quality.
- Real-Time Insights: Leading audit intelligent automation solutions enable real-time data analysis and assessment, providing up-to-date information for agile decision-making. Monthly or quarterly reports can be outdated by the time they are ready.
- Enables Audit Automation: Audit automation solutions should enhance the automation of key information between different documents. This speeds up the audit process, prevents reliance on outdated data, and minimizes errors.
The Future of Audit is Intelligent Automation
Discover how intelligent automation is shaking up the audit profession and why many consider it the absolute future.