1. Documentation and Risk Assessment of the Audit Universe
2. Selecting and Scheduling Audit Candidates
3. Monitoring and Augmenting the Plan
4. Follow up

In today’s spotlight; we will focus on the beginning with the documentation and risk assessment of the audit universe. Most of our customers break their audit universe down into Audit Units (AUs). Each AUs is centered on a financial or other key processes in the organization (and essentially anything else that might be audited at some point such as applications, branches, capital projects and the like). To ensure a streamlined documentation process, each Audit Unit in BPS allows for the documentation of common fields to help identify and classify the AU. BPS also supports the idea that different types of AUs may vary in their data, types of documentation, scheduling rules and more. On a year over year basis, the software also helps maintain the audit universe through updates as the organizational changes. BPS streamlines this process by utilizing workflow and advanced filtering capabilities to offer you the complete historical data that you need at the time that you need it.

Once the Audit Universe is in place, risk assessment can take place and can feed the scheduling process. Prior to acquiring technology to support this aspect of planning, BPS users state that they found this to be an arduous process executed in and out of workshops. For BPS the key to adding value here was to provide the users with the appropriate information and collaborative features to conduct and capture the risk assessment all in one place. In BPS, this includes quick and easy access to the audit history of the audit unit, the open issues and the scoring history. Together with advanced filtering, this provides a streamlined process to ensuring the risk assessment of the universe is accurate.

At BPS, we believe that using software to manage your Audit universe is a great way to streamline your entire audit or risk management process. Building the audit universe is the first step to really understanding the where the risks in your enterprise are. It is important that within the audit function, this is an efficient, consistent and transparent process. Building the universe in a structured way provides the ability for companies to generating easy to use management and audit committee reports and enables the organization to manage their audit practice from the plan. Next time we will start to focus on how to use the audit universe to create and monitor a plan for your organization.

BPS Audit™ provides internal audit software to the world’s best-run companies. BPS works closely with its clients and has one of the largest ongoing investments in audit software research and development. One of our goals is to provide information to the audit community about our product’s features and how each feature helps auditors and their companies achieve their goals. At BPS we look at the whole risk management picture but we focus on the refinement of each feature and module so that we can add value to our customers right away. Every week our user community and internal experts propose a BPS feature they would like to highlight and discuss. We share this information with the audit community to stimulate interest and dialogue surrounding our product as well as helping people understand what technology has to offer the audit space now and in the future.