Today, financial resilience is one of the main attributes that determine whether your company will adapt and thrive in these uncertain times. It might be surprising, but your annual business audit can be a secret weapon in your efforts to increase business agility. It provides clarity by identifying how well internal controls and financial reporting are working and which process improvements should be the highest on your priority list. The insights you gain from the audit can be a roadmap that gets you ready to overcome any obstacles that crop up because of unpredictable economic conditions.

During an audit, your company’s financial dealings are an open book. Digital documents and automated workflow ensure that this book is well-organized, factual and easy to understand. With electronic document management, all business documents are searchable in a few clicks and easy for auditors to search for by criteria like vendor name, product type, amount, or date or with fulltext search. If you’ve integrated document management with your financial software, auditors can access supporting information without leaving your accounting system or ERP - this makes the whole auditing process easier for them.

With digital document management, you can store and retrieve complete and secure records of all business transactions to speed up the audit process. All information is equally findable, whether its source is emails, contracts, correspondence or financial statements. You can access data when you need it, without delay. The best part is that you can provide secure, online access for auditors to free AP and accounting staff to concentrate on their daily tasks.

How DocuWare Cloud safeguards the integrity of the audit process

• Promotes transparency in business operations and drives accountability. It’s easy to track who processed each financial transaction and who approved payment.

• Helps you determine the effectiveness of internal controls. Digital document management facilitates a better understanding of your operational efficiency, the reliability of financial reporting procedures and your compliance with current federal and state laws and regulations.

• Ensures comprehensive protection for all your documents including those related to intellectual property and proprietary knowledge. DocuWare Cloud offers a well-designed and secure storage system that protects information that should never be lost, stolen or compromised.

• Shields business information from crypto viruses, ransomware and other malware. With its Microsoft Azure foundation, 99 percent of all viruses are already known which is why a contaminated document is immediately recognized by DocuWare and can't even be archived. Even a completely new virus would not be able to spread to your company’s other documents, because the malware has no access to the corresponding data store.

• Makes it easier to assess your use of resources to identify potential cost savings. Audit findings provide a launching pad for honest discussions of profit and loss. This discussion might lead to conversations about how your pricing compares with industry standards or whether your company is offering too deep a discount.

• Simplifies finding errors in financial statements to ensure that they have been prepared in accordance with accounting rules and government regulations.

• Creates a digital audit trail for all financial transactions. This makes it easier to confirm that balance sheets, cash flow statements, and earnings and expense reports are accurate. Audit trails also provide a date and time stamp and a record of who conducted each process step.
• Protects your company from fraud and employee theft. When auditors question a transaction, they can pull up all related documents like purchase orders, invoices, vouchers and checks to immediately assess their validity. This is especially important when they’re verifying cash transactions.

• Secures your documents in case of natural disasters. Ensures business continuity with redundant data backups saved multiple times in secure data centers. Thanks to all of this, your documents and information can be made available again in no time after an unforeseeable event.