audit Archives - Page 2 of 5

Three Fundamental Questions to Ask in Audit

July 24, 2023

Are you teaching your team the real work or just the compliance work?

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

Instant download:
“The New Manifesto for Accountants.“

When I started in accounting, we wrote audit programs out by hand, and we thought about what it was we needed to do to carry out our audit procedures.

And then, the firm got a copy machine. That started the arts and crafts period of public accounting.

MORE: The Big Issues in Audit: Frustration, Inconsistency and Technology | Five Ways to Increase Audit Efficiency | Early Adopters Gain an Edge in Audit | Talent Retention: Five Tips for an Audit Adjustment | Six Benefits of an Internal Audit | The Ten Financial Controls That’ll Make You a Hero | Five Cash Reports You Can’t Live Without | When an Audit Is a Great Thing
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Because we were going to do the same as last year, every year we would make a copy of last year’s hand-written audit program, cut out the sign-offs, tape that on a new page, make sure to draw the lines for the sign-offs, and then we’d make a copy of that. Then we had our audit program for the new year.

How Auditors Can Beat AI

July 23, 2023

By Alan Anderson

Ignore the coming tsunami of change at your own peril.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

Instant download:
“The New Manifesto for Accountants.“

The other day, I picked up a college textbook on auditing from 2001.

MORE: The Disruptors: Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson | The Big Issues in Audit: Frustration, Inconsistency and Technology | Five Ways to Increase Audit Efficiency | Early Adopters Gain an Edge in Audit | Talent Retention: Five Tips for an Audit Adjustment | Six Benefits of an Internal Audit | The Ten Financial Controls That’ll Make You a Hero | Five Cash Reports You Can’t Live Without | When an Audit Is a Great Thing
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Even back then, that book listed these as “critical forces on the profession:”

Increasing market saturation with relatively little opportunity for growth
Perceptions that financial statement audits have become a commodity
Price competition and continual pressure to reduce fees
Cost pressures that have resulted in the reduction of time devoted to engagements
Perceptions that the incidence and severity of alleged audit failures have increased

In the 20-plus years since that book was published, not much has changed. Today many of the college students who learned auditing from that textbook are in leadership positions at audit firms. They were warned about what we were up against.

That we are still facing those same “critical forces,” which have only exacerbated since then, is an indicator of the ossified state of leadership in the audit profession.

Five Ways to Increase Audit Efficiency

December 28, 2022

By CPA Trendlines Research

Keep your financial statement audit off the naughty list.

By Sarah Timmons

Sarah Timmons is a chief auditor with AuditClub.cpa, which provides on-demand audit and assurance review support for work papers, financial statements and engagement quality control reviews, as well as quality control and training services, and more to audit departments of CPA firms of all sizes.

As December flies by and busy season quickly approaches, it’s time to reflect on the successes and shortcomings of the past to plan for the first quarter of the new year.

MORE: Six Benefits of an Internal Audit | The Ten Financial Controls That’ll Make You a Hero | Five Cash Reports You Can’t Live Without | When an Audit Is a Great Thing
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Effective and efficient audits are the result of proper planning and, most of all, communications – with your staff, your client and, sometimes, your therapist.

Here is a checklist of some simple tasks to help make the audit season a bit less stressful:

Talent Retention: Five Tips for an Audit Adjustment

December 23, 2022

By CPA Trendlines Research

Dodge the perfect storm of quiet quitting, the great resignation and busy season.

By Chis Vanover

Chris Vanover is an outspoken survivor of the Big 4 and PCAOB and has committed himself and AuditClub.cpa to helping transform how public accounting firms deliver audit and assurance services.

The accounting industry is facing a growth in demand but suffering a squeeze on available talent.

Bloomberg Tax calculates that the number of accountants and auditors employed fell 17 percent between 2019 and 2021. The shortage starts on the supply side: The number of U.S. students completing bachelor’s degrees in accounting declined from 2016 to 2020, according to the AICPA’s 2021 Trends Report.

MORE TRENDS & OUTLOOK for 2023: The Biggest Change in Accounting? Personnel | Look Who’s Making Money Now | Merger Minded? Go Out on Top! | Capacity Strategies Drive Change | Who Wants to Be Partner? Not Enough | Private Equity Heats Up M&A | Top Five Trends | Compensation Gets Creative | CPA Partners Rejoice on Surging Fee Growth | The Office Is Over | Accounting Firms Face Up to Private Equity | IRS Hires Will Add Pressures | Consolidation Brings Challenges, Opportunities |

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The short supply is aggravated by high turnover and growing demand. Accountants have been leaving corporations and audit firms in record numbers. Though it’s been expected for some time that baby boomer retirements would produce a talent crunch, the crunch has been earlier and tighter than expected because of the great resignation.
READ MORE →

Early Adopters Gain an Edge in Audit

September 3, 2022

By Donny Shimamoto

Innovation Insights: Paving the way for ESG reporting.

Follow CPA Trendlines Podcasts on Apple Podcasts here or grab the RSS feed here.

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto, CPA, CITP, CGMA
Center for Accounting Transformation

Those who hesitate to adopt mature technologies could find themselves too far behind to easily catch up, according to tech experts Pete Myers, CEO of Auvenir, and Donny Shimamoto, founder and managing partner of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies.

MORE: Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free | Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers | Private Equity vs. the CPA Firm Partnership The FinTech Flood: Accounting Will Never Be the Same | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | Your Sales Tax Headaches Are Only Just Beginning | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson | Turning Client Service into New Revenue

SEE ALSO: Deloitte Develops Audit Technology for Smaller Firms

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Myers and Shimamoto discussed the latest developments in cloud technology for audit, specifically for small to mid-size firms, explaining that heightened security measures have allowed platforms to expand capabilities and deliver streamlined results that can be tailored to specific situations. However, Shimamoto lamented that many auditors and firms are hesitant to bring on new technology, a mindset that could leave them clamoring to catch up.

AI, OCR, NLP & CPAs: Oh My!

August 3, 2022

By Donny Shimamoto

Innovation Insights: How Trullion is trying to revolutionize rev. rec. and lease accounting.

^ Click to play video | > Play the podcast and follow CPA Trendlines Podcasts on Apple Podcasts here or grab the RSS feed here.

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

Accounting, along with legal, pioneered technology that continues to grow and allows automation of mundane tasks. Isaac Heller, the co-founder and CEO of Trullion, discusses with Donny Shimamoto how AI uses optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language procession (NLP) to read documents like PDFs and Excel, and extracts relevant data, like lease dates, into databases, where they can be used for computations or searching.

MORE on TRULLION: Trullion Lands $15 Million in Series A | Trullion: New A.I. Startup Targets Rev Rec, Lease Accounting

MORE on LEASE ACCOUNTING: Lease Accounting Hits Hard | Lease Accounting Is About to Get Very Real

MORE PODCASTS & VIDEOS: CAS or CAAS? Getting Clarity | The Seller’s Guide to Getting the Best Price for Your Firm | Doing Nothing Is Not an Option | Why the Future Is in Risk Advisory | Fine-Tuning the Subscription Fee Model | Thinking Smart about New Tech: Byron Patrick | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free | Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers | Private Equity vs. the CPA Firm Partnership The FinTech Flood: Accounting Will Never Be the Same | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | Your Sales Tax Headaches Are Only Just Beginning | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson | Turning Client Service into New Revenue | See all podcasts and videos here

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Heller and Shimamoto discuss the origins of professional technology, sharing how accounting was the perfect breeding ground for database software. “When you think of Oracle and SAP and Intuit going way back, these were really the pioneers of database software,” Heller says. “It’s as simple as that, you know, the general ledger and the accounts payable and accounts receivable framework fits really, really well in a software model. So, there was kind of this jump out of the gate where we were able to do so much in accounting.”

More Takeaways:

Why the Future Is in Risk Advisory

July 15, 2022

By Donny Shimamoto

Innovation Insights: The future of audit is risk advisory, according to Jin Chang. To recruit, the profession must shift focus from manual work to advisory work.

^ Stream the video | Or download the podcast

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

Because audit work is nonlinear and highly complex, disparate workflow systems in audit are not only an IT risk, they’re also a project nightmare. Jin Chang, the founder of Fieldguide, explained to Donny Shimamoto that the end-to-end project has many workflows that need to be templatized and automated along the project life cycle.

MORE: Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free | Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers | Private Equity vs. the CPA Firm Partnership The FinTech Flood: Accounting Will Never Be the Same | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | Your Sales Tax Headaches Are Only Just Beginning | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson | Turning Client Service into New Revenue

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He added that the best way to recruit is for the profession to shift from manual work to advisory work.. Further, while financial reporting has always been a risky area, people in business today are caring about many other risk areas and choosing to do business with other companies that also subscribe to their values from supply chain to deliverables and beyond.

More Takeaways:

How Auditors Can Improve Efficiency and the Budget

April 15, 2022

By Donny Shimamoto

Innovation Insights: Five clicks in five minutes? Sounds too good to be true – but automation can be simple and life-changing.

^ Stream the video | Or download the podcast

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto
CPA Trendlines presents a Center for Accounting Transformation production

(Recorded February 2022)

With everyone going remote, it’s presenting auditors with new challenges. But technology can help, according to Colleen Knuff and Stefan Davis, in this interview with Donny Shimamoto.

Part of Wolters Kluwer, which was recently accepted to the ASC X9 (American National Standards Institute or ANSI), the industry setting body for financial institutions, Knuff and Davis explain not only how some solutions allow real-time collaboration versus working in silos, but also how data-driven audits increase capacity and allow more profitability while reducing risk and maintaining high peer-review standards.

MORE: Why Doing Nothing Is Not an Option | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be Free| Private Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers | Private Equity vs. the CPA Firm Partnership The FinTech Flood: Accounting Will Never Be the Same | Think Small to Think Big with Matt Wilkinson | Your Sales Tax Headaches Are Only Just Beginning | When Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey Schmidt | Can Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves? | Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson | Turning Client Service into New Revenue

Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

Knuff and Davis also discussed how recently-developed tools can assist with diagnostics and help auditors stay on track while delivering more compliant and dynamic audits, which could better assess risk. The multiple-year views and periodic annual views versus the year-end financials give better business insights and make it easier to spot various trends and identify business performance factors. READ MORE →