Filed under Internal Audit, Operations, and Workpapers.com News

Keeping a sharp eye on the hours budgeted for a given audit project is the key to running a profitable audit firm. All of us in client service know that blown budgets lead to lower realization rates and, in turn, a less profitable firm. However, often times, the importance of project budgeting is overlooked in internal audit departments.

Within the internal audit department, just like in most corporate departments, people’s time is the most important resource at the disposal of the CAE (Chief Audit Executive). It only follows then that deploying your overall inventory of person-time effectively is critical to realizing the highest-value results. Yet all to often, after we move away from client service and into industry/internal audit, we stop carefully budgeting projects and holding ourselves accountable for budget overruns.

Workpapers.com recently added a set of simple tools around project budgeting and automatically tracking progress against the budget (e.g. budget to actual or WIP) based on the time entries made by the audit team. Now it is snap to see where you are in relation to the planned budget as well as where time was spent, both within a project and across all your current projects.

So, for Workpapers.com customers at least, the tracking problem is solved. It is just up to each of us to have the discipline to plan effectively and the courage to assign accountability for the results. Once that happens, each team will see more high-impact audit work coming out of the same inventory of person-time within just few months, every single time.