When we built workpapers.com, the most important thing we did was make decisions about how the workflow for each audit should look. While this may seem intuitively obvious, auditors who have worked with either multiple clients or worked at different companies know how each organization or audit team likes to do things a certain way. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients over the years and distilled that experience into the best possible execution workflow. We then looked at that and realized that what we had just done was important for more than building software. What we had done is developed an audit execution framework that we think should be leveraged across the audit industry.

A few months back we released this execution framework calling it “Audit Fuel”, since the framework is designed very specifically to maximize auditor productivity and results. All of the details on the Audit Fuel Framework can be found at http://auditfuel.org, but I wanted to post a couple of flowcharts to help potential workpapers.com customers understand how audits flow in the system. This chart shows the flow for audits of internal control such as SOX 404 audits, SAS 70 audits, many (if not most) internal audits, and business process reviews.

As you can see, all of the key steps of internal control auditor workflow are included in the framework in a visualization that helps the auditor do less planning and get started working. While not required, we like to draft deliverables first. This makes the objectives of the audit clear and sets the auditor down the correct path to be able to break audit procedures down in a way that will ensure they ultimately roll back up into the audit report properly without wasting time on unnecessary procedures.

Anyway, with this core execution model in place, effective communication is the last hurdle to an efficient and effective audit. It is really a couple of key enablers that ensure 1) effective communication with the client or business process owners and 2) effective communication among the audit team. The enablers are appropriate use of request list items, to-do items (or review notes), and supervisor reviews/sign-offs and make the execution enablers piece of the Audit Fuel Framework.

We made a small release this week that adds a couple of new features…

The first one is for people like me that live in their workpapers.com account and already get too much email. For people like us, we added an email notification opt-out. Simply click on “My Profile” and uncheck the “Email Notifications” box. Once you do, you will no longer receive emails when someone assigns something to you for review or when someone assigns you to-do items. I am in workpapers.com so much that I will see the items without email notifications, I’m guessing many of you are the same.

The second I like even more… We’ve added the summary graphs of findings status to the PDF status report. Now when you produce the status report, not only do you get the progress summary graphs and the objective by objective detailed progress information but also the summary of findings (how many, how severe, open/closed status). We think this make the status report much more complete while retaining the ease of producing the report in one click.

Hope these help. We’re looking forward to some bigger feature releases within the next few weeks, stay tuned.

It is hard to believe how much talk their is at the AICPA TECH+ conference about client portals. After to talking to several people about their use of client portals, it seems CPA firms’ tax practices are driving a lot of this discussion. However, with request list management, unlimited secure file uploads and downloads form anywhere, etc. firms in the audit and and compliance space should seriously consider workpapers.com and giving their customers accounts. This takes the idea of client portals to a whole new level of collaboration and organizations.

Take the tour or contact us if you might like to explore this idea further.

In order to remain responsive to the needs of different types of organizations, we are now offering an option for private server installations of the Audit Fuel Workpapers software. Private server installs will give an organization a dedicated server(s), dedicated database for system data, dedicated file storage buckets, and dedicated firewall where we can implement customized configuration.

We still do not (and will not) on-site customer installations as we feel doing so would put the quality of our service at risk, which we will not do. However, offering private, dedicated hosting gives larger organizations to have to customize their installation to meet specific company policies.

If you are interested in a dedicated server installation, please contact us for a pricing quote. Pricing for private server installations includes a one time setup fee of $1000-5000 (depending on specific needs) and a monthly or annual service fee (starting at $2000/month with discounts for annual payment), just like our standard plans.

In accordance with the philosophy we developed as part of the Audit Fuel audit execution framework, we feel that all of the different types of audit workpapers.com should handle really fall into two categories: “Control Based Audits” and “Workplan Based Audits”.

Examples of Control Based Audits:

• Sarbanes-Oxley Audits
• SAS 70 Audits
• Internal Audits of Internal Control
• Business Process Reviews

Examples of Workplan Based Audits:

• Most Compliance Audits (PCI, HIPAA, Banking Regulation, etc)
• Royalty and Licensing Audits
• Internal Audits with Specific Workplans/Audit Steps

Audit Fuel Workpapers was originally designed for control-based audits, however we immediately wanted to add workplan based audit types for use on our audit engagements that were not internal control audits. So, we have finally gotten there and these audit types are now available in the system. To use them, simply select a workplan-based audit type when setting up a new audit.

Have a great audit!