If you’ve never had a professional audit performed for your business or organization, you may not realize the many benefits they afford. Some of these are obvious, while other advantages are only realized outside of the black-and-white numbers on a page.
One of the most valued benefits is the assurance that you can rely on the financial statements you’re seeing, and know they are timely and accurate. Since an audit is a higher level of scrutiny than a review or compilation, an audit provides a clear fiscal picture that is easy to understand.
Once you are able to clearly view your revenues and expenditures, this has the effect of making it much easier to identify errors in the bookkeeping, so you can make sound decisions based on good information.
Audits can be invaluable to not-for-profit organizations whose funding often relies on being able to show that their donors’ money is going where they intended it. Without the ability to make clear and transparent financial disclosures, non-profits risk seeing their charitable giving dry up.
In a family-owned business where some of the owners are geographically distant and less active in the day-to-day running of the company, an audit can provide them assurance that operations are being run efficiently and according to common goals, reducing the possibility for acrimony.
As time goes on and the possibility of a sale or need for a valuation crops up, regular audits provide a measurable, credible history that makes planning for future events better grounded.
Beyond giving you hard financial data to enhance management of the business or organization, there are several complementary benefits of having an audit.
One is deterring or potentially finding the existence of fraud. Although audits are not designed specifically to uncover malfeasance, they can often do so by giving an extra group of eyes insight into financial dealings. The knowledge that auditors are coming to look at the books at regular intervals also helps keep employees honest and deter potential fraudulent activity.
The process of conducting the audit also gives the business owner/manager valuable feedback on deficiencies in internal control, helping expose and therefore mitigate wasteful activities.
Finally, one of the most powerful advantages of an audit is that by giving a trusted outside CPA firm access to your financial workings, you gain a recurring outside, objective perspective that can help avoid the tunnel vision that can come into play when one is neck-deep in running a business on a day-to-day basis.
Sponsel CPA Group has an experienced team of expert auditors who not only assemble the right numbers on a ledger, but also assist your organization as management consultants. By sharing our expansive knowledge of best practices across a variety of industries, audits can help make a business stronger and more efficient. In addition, in our audit reports we include supplementary schedules of Key Performance Indicators and other financial data that is meaningful to the managers of the business.
If we can be any assistance in discussing the scope and benefits of an audit for your business, please call Mike Bedel at (317) 613-7852 or email [email protected].