AUDIT & ASSURANCE

Are You Looking at the Big Picture?

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Young black woman sitting in front of laptop looking thoughtful

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
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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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Meet Your Client All Year, Not Just During Audit

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Businesspeople having a meeting over coffee sitting together at a table discussing a document, young man and two middle-aged women present

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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Right-Sizing the Audit, with Alan Anderson

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Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024, 12 Noon PM ET

Register here | Learn more

Join Alan Anderson, founder and president of Account-Ability Plus and author of “Transforming Audit for the Future,” for a dynamic session on how to make the audit fun and profitable again.

Too many firms approach audit planning as a SALY afterthought. But that’s a mistake.

In this session, Anderson reveals the secret to right-sizing the audit. He teaches a planning methodology that ensures successful audits every time. The process creates a better work experience for staff, assists in providing more value for clients, and ensures that the financials are issued on time.

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Regulation, Geopolitical Instability Spark Concern

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bar charts

Audit partners seeing modest optimism across companies.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Auditors have a special sense of what’s happening in American business. They see the numbers that others don’t. They prepare their firms and clients for what’s to come.

This year, audit partners are sensing a guarded confidence in the economy, albeit with considerable nervousness about the geopolitical situation, according to the Center for Audit Quality’s 2024 Audit Partner Pulse Survey.

MORE: Ten Ways to Manage Price Increases | Survey Says 57% of Firms Are Raising Prices Next Year | Twelve Years and Out: Seasoned Accountants Join the Exodus | Survey Shows Big Opportunities in Small Business | The Slow, Painful Death of the 150-Hour Rule | Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Squeezed | In-Person Conferences Still Essential | Accounting ARC
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Geopolitical Instability

For the first time, geopolitical instability ranks in the top five economic risks facing companies over the next 12 months.

In fact, it ranks third, a fear substantially more serious than that of cybersecurity and rising interest rates.
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Give Your Audit Teams Tasks That Increase Business Acumen

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Business-mindedness helps you identify risks.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

I’ve previously described a task I have teams perform at the end of an audit. After everyone shares their insights about what they learned about that client and their operations, I ask everyone to complete this phrase:

“If I were running this business, I would ______________.”

 

MORE: Are You Using the Right Business Model? | 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 | Put the Ethics Code to Work for Your Clients and Your Firm | Is Audit in Crisis Because of Definitions?
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Here are a few of the ideas I’ve heard audit teams come up with in that exercise:

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