Why is the end of year audit such a struggle for many companies? It’s not just the laborious task of compiling and checking all of the information required for the audit into one place. The problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We wonder what we will find this time around. How bad will things be, and what issues will we have to fix? Often, things discovered in an audit will reveal a wide range of operational issues at once. Examples include-
– Lack of clarity regarding responsibilities within your organization
– Previously unidentified knowledge gaps and process gaps
– Outdated processes and operations that fall behind regulatory and operational changes
These issues are not always an easy to fix. It is crucial to identify and deal with these problems as soon as they arise. But often the audit comes all too late, uncovering issues that may have started out small, but grew into larger issues, requiring more complicated solutions.
Audits may reveal a large number of issues at once. A bottleneck can easily develop when implementing many changes required to address multiple problems at once. In an ideal world, you would be able to address these issues as soon as they arise, before they spiral or grow out of control. The best way to do this is to track your operations and obligations in real-time. Thankfully, there are now systems available that allow us to do this.
The benefits of real-time tracking
By tracking your compliance in real-time, the audit becomes a byproduct of a well-integrated system. Responding to issues as soon as they arise should be the top priority of your team. When you rely on a periodic audit, the only real information you have is historical, which leaves you to make decisions based on old information. Often this means misguided, wrongly calculated decisions based on factors that may not be relevant or true anymore. So, the benefits of real-time tracking within your business aren’t just that audits are much simpler. The main benefit is it allows you to respond quickly and effectively to changes and issues as they arise.
For a compliance management system to work well, it has to be integrated into your day-to-day operations. With integrated systems, tracking and viewing changes as they happen is not the only important feature. A good system will also allow you to deploy responses to that data, to as many or as few people as the change is relevant to. The same technology that allows real-time tracking is a two-way street and should allow real-time responses. By keeping this relationship between the information, you receive and the action you take clear, people at every level can have a clear understanding of the context that surrounds their compliance tasks. When people understand the why, the what always turns out better.
About Totum
Audits can steal valuable time and resources. With tools that automate these processes, more time and resources can be allocated to proactively identifying and managing issues before they turn into non-compliance in an audit. Totum Compliance is designed with all of this in mind. It tracks your compliance and audit requirements in real-time and integrates that information into your day-to-day business operations. It’s a well-integrated, versatile system, designed specifically for solving this problem. If your company could benefit from seamlessly integrating compliance into your business operations, get in touch. We’d be happy to chat about how we can help you to streamline your auditing processes.
Feel free to get in touch with Totum today to talk about how our software can help you to manage your auditing processes.
