if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
by alan anderson, cpa
transforming audit for the future
next time you have your planning meeting about an upcoming audit, print out a page or two of what you say on your website. share those pages around, and ask the planning team members, “how are we going to deliver on what we’ve said on our website?”
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most people think of planning an audit as an exercise in filling out forms. planning an audit is certainly much deeper than that. the ultimate foundation for success in your audits depends on what you do during the planning stage.
i tell firms all the time that if they planned their audits in the same manner they plan any event in their social life, their audits would be at least 100 times better. if you’re going to a football game, you know who’s bringing the food, who’s bringing the beer, where you’ll meet, and you have contingency plans in case something goes wrong. everything is orchestrated to the nth detail.
but when i ask some firms how much time they spend on planning, they tell me that the time they spend planning is commensurate with the time it takes to drive to the client on the first day of fieldwork.
most firms’ workflow is abysmal. our whole audit process is what i call a fifo, or first in, first out, approach to auditing. we keep pushing the work back. we do the planning during fieldwork, and then we do the problematic areas after fieldwork when we should just be wrapping up loose ends and finalizing everything. then, we issue the report after that marathon wrap-up session. it’s no wonder we can’t deliver any relevance in this audit process because we’ve pushed all the work back.
when there’s no time to plan the audit adequately, the easy way out is to use the saly approach – the same as last year’s. but that path may not take you where you want to go.
in yogi berra’s wise words, “if you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” the saly approach may get you through the audit, but it might not be the path to the insights you need to capture to add value to your audits.
there’s a better way. if you want to drive change in your firm, you need to think about ways to pull the work forward so we can do the right amount of planning. planning is a lot more than just filling out forms. planning is where you lay the foundation for creating relevance in an audit.
the biggest complaint i get about planning is that there’s no time to plan adequately. however, i worked with a firm a few years ago that developed a discipline in their workflow around planning. the head of a&a aimed to reduce busy season hours by 20 percent to level the workload so it wasn’t such a drain on staff. they accomplished that by pulling their planning ahead out of busy season and got the vast majority of it done well before the end of the year.
when i work with firms, i put in place metrics to complete all planning at least 30 days before year-end. that includes getting the partner to review the planning, getting the client’s commitment on the pbc (provided by client) list and completing the schedules ahead of time.
what’s the old adage? if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.