Filed under Audit Management, Team Collaboration, and Workpapers.com News

As announced in the December newsletter email, we have added a new role to those available inside each audit project. The new role is for the audit client and makes collaboration with clients easy and elegant.

The Thinking We Applied to the Client Role

When we conduct audits, there are always basically three things that we collaborate directly with the client (or in the case of internal audit, the business owner) on. Those are 1) the audit request list, 2) the audit findings, and 3) the status of the project. At the same time however, it is important in many audits that the client does not see the specific audit worksteps so the auditor is able to change those worksteps in response to changes in audit needs and to be able to inject changes and randomness when necessary.

Therefore, that is exactly what we have given the client project role access to. When a person is added to a project with the client role, they will see four tabs:

1. The Request List tab – Allows the client to track the request list open items, edit who is responsible for each item, and securely upload the files requested
2. The Findings tab – Allows the client to see the findings identified in the audit and provide associated management responses
3. The Status tab – Allows the client to instantly check audit status so the auditor does need to prepare manual status updates
4. The Client Dashboard tab – A dashboard that combines information from the three tabs listed above to give the client one screen where they can get an easy overview of the audit and their responsibilities within it

Try out the client role, we’re sure it will make your audits even easier to manage while making things easier for the client also. They will also be extraordinarily impressed with your audit team's ability to use technology gracefully to make the audit easy (something they wish so many auditors before you had done).