You can’t build it in at the end.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

“It takes less time to do things right than to explain why you did them wrong.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Many audit firms think about quality as a task carried out at the end of the audit by the quality control reviewer. The problem with that thinking is that sometimes the QC reviewer misses major problems. For example, I was working with the new QC reviewer at one firm who spent most of the review time looking at the superficial details of formatting and punctuation, but almost disastrously missing a $3 million error that I spotted right away because the relationships between the numbers didn’t make sense.

MORE: 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
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Quality in audit shouldn’t be just an extra step at the end of the audit, but it should be an approach woven into the fabric of the firm. Quality is an attitude of “first time right” that permeates every task and every step in the audit. If you leave quality for the end, you’ll be challenged at delivering quality in your audits.
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How this one attribute strengthens others.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” – Theodore Roosevelt

When you think about business leaders like Bill Gates or Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, it’s clear that these people did not create their empires by focusing on narrow measures like realization rates or increasing their profit margin. Neither of these organizations would have become the household names they are if their founders had had such narrow views, and if they had not been able to move these very large companies in new directions in response to changes in the world.

MORE: 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 | Four Questions to Make Your Firm More Successful as a Business
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

 

Business-mindedness in audit has deeper dimensions than making a reasonable profit and delivering an audit report on time. Even if you’re not concerned about the future of audit, strengthening the attribute of business-mindedness in your firm will strengthen your firm and make it more attractive to clients and team members. Let’s talk about some of the tangible benefits.
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Reinforce the teaching in every experience.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

Another method for ingraining a business-mindedness attitude into the culture of the firm is to treat every experience as a learning opportunity. Partners take staff accountants to lunch with clients all the time, and the three of them talk business. But most partners never do anything with that experience. A better approach is to have a follow-up meeting where the partner asks the staff accountant questions about what they heard and what they learned during the conversation. This could even be on the car ride back to the office.

MORE: Meet Your Client All Year, Not Just During Audit | Give Your Audit Teams Tasks That Increase Business Acumen | Stop Mixing Up Your V’s and Losing Your Best People | How to Upgrade C and D Clients | Can a Service Center Model Solve Audit Staffing Shortages? | Move to Advisory and Assurance with Relevance | Use Eight Audit Exit Items to Deepen Client Relationships | Know Your Three Audit W’s | Planning Lays the Foundation of Audit Relevance | Are You Correctly Identifying the Relevance Intersection? | Traditional Audits Don’t Deserve Premium Billing
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

 

Business-mindedness means we take seriously the development of the talent in our firms so that what we reward is business acumen, having great conversations with clients and with the team, and coming up with valuable advice for the clients. But instead, what many firms value is the chargeable hour. They don’t want to take the time out of chargeable hour budgets to have those conversations or to reinforce the learning from meetings with clients.
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Will there be more work? Most likely.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

When you’re a client-serving firm, the service doesn’t end with delivery of the financial statement audit. Client service should be perceived as a continuous, ongoing process that is supported by the culture with accountability measures. Client service is a relationship that is developed by habit.

MORE: Give Your Audit Teams Tasks That Increase Business Acumen | Are You Using the Right Business Model? | Empower Your Team by Dumping C and D Clients | Eleven Types of Audit Clients and Which to Fire | Don’t Take on Audits in an Industry You Don’t Understand | How ‘Business Expert CPAs’ Get Their Own Business Wrong | Exceptional Audit Client Service Demands Effective Communication | Five Ways to Prevent Audit Bottlenecks
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CPA firms tend to get bogged down in the work, so I developed a process for developing those relationships. I would sit down with the team and tell the senior accountant and the manager that they needed to meet at least quarterly with their counterpart at the client. The senior would meet with the controller. The manager would meet with the CFO. My responsibility would be to meet with the CEO or the business owner. These meetings could be phone calls but at least one of those meetings would be for lunch. If they desired, the senior and manager could have a joint lunch meeting with the controller and the CFO.
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