Here’s what you’re looking for: Alan Anderson

And how to rethink client service.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

When most auditors hear the word “innovation,” they think it has to do with getting more technology. But that’s only a small part of what innovation means. Innovation isn’t just throwing more technology at your audit processes. That approach is often just replicating with technology what you have done in paper for decades.

MORE: How to Advance from Audit to Advisory | Create a Culture of Audit Quality Assurance | What Quality in Audit Leadership Means | Business-minded Approach Helps Build a Better Firm | Are You Looking at the Big Picture? | Meet Your Client All Year, Not Just During Audit | Give Your Audit Teams Tasks That Increase Business Acumen | Are You Using the Right Business Model? | Give Advice While Remaining Independent | Stop Mixing Up Your V’s and Losing Your Best People | Empower Your Team by Dumping C and D Clients | The New Formula for an Accounting Business
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According to an article in Forbes, “Innovation is the rethinking or reimagining of a business process that already exists.” Applied to audit, innovation is reimagining what audit is and what audit can be. It’s the transformation of audit from a commoditized compliance-only function to a sought-after and highly valued service that produces benefits to the clients who use that service and to the firms who provide that service.

Innovation is the spark that gets you to a new state. It’s the a-ha moment that drives the action to change. Innovation can lead to transformation, but only if done with the intention of transformation. It means being willing to try doing things differently and being willing to try doing different things.
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Moving from quality control to quality assurance lets you advance from auditing and accounting to assurance and advisory.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

For decades, A&A has stood for audit and accounting. It’s been focused on compliance. But sooner than we may want to believe, business owners and stakeholders will be using technology to provide the assurance they need.

This is already happening. To remain viable, we need to move A&A from audit and accounting to assurance and advisory.

MORE: Create a Culture of Audit Quality Assurance | What Quality in Audit Leadership Means | Meet Your Client All Year, Not Just During Audit | Give Advice While Remaining Independent | The New Formula for an Accounting Business | Don’t Risk Losing Good Employees for Bad Clients | Four Questions to Make Your Firm More Successful as a Business | Say Adios to Audit Fee Pressure | Deliver More Audit Value by Getting Out of the Conference Room | Six Essential Elements in Audit Planning | Before the Audit: More Than Just Planning | Five Crucial Attributes for Successful Audit Leadership
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Now all auditors take the quality control standards of our profession seriously. But quality control that only happens at the end is more about satisfying the minimum requirements for compliance. It won’t let you move out of providing the commodity service that clients need to keep their stakeholders happy. Quality at the end doesn’t provide an opportunity to really look under the hood and think about what the client really wants.
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Get a better result in less time.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

For way too long, many firm leaders have equated quality in their audits with making it through the peer review process. Peer review is important, but making quality all about that is like the American car executives whose production lines needed a guy with a rubber mallet at the end of the production line to make sure the door fit right. That’s quality control.

MORE: What Quality in Audit Leadership Means | Business-minded Approach Helps Build a Better Firm | Are You Looking at the Big Picture? | Meet Your Client All Year, Not Just During Audit | Give Your Audit Teams Tasks That Increase Business Acumen | Are You Using the Right Business Model? | Give Advice While Remaining Independent | Stop Mixing Up Your V’s and Losing Your Best People | Empower Your Team by Dumping C and D Clients | The New Formula for an Accounting Business | How to Upgrade C and D Clients | Eleven Types of Audit Clients and Which to Fire | Don’t Risk Losing Good Employees for Bad Clients | Can a Service Center Model Solve Audit Staffing Shortages? | Don’t Take on Audits in an Industry You Don’t Understand
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

 

Quality assurance is making the guy with the rubber mallet irrelevant. The first-time right mindset is taking the Japanese approach and making sure the door is designed so it fits correctly from the beginning.

Quality control is at the end. Quality assurance starts at the beginning and continues throughout the entire process. It’s not a one-time event.
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