Planning for 2022.

As audit teams and businesses alike begin the wind down for the Christmas / New Year break, now is the ideal time to start planning for a successful 2022.

Many audit teams can agree, that once the new annual plan has been approved by the audit committee and the team is full swing into executing the annual plan, it is quite hard to find time to do all those odd jobs which could help improve your audit processes and function. So whilst the business has started winding down for the holidays, and audit teams are unable to execute audits, now is the time for us to start catching up on those odd jobs.

The best starting place is your Internal Audit Self-Assessment. This template lists each of the internal audit standards and allows audit teams to assess their level of compliance with each standard. As teams work through this self assessment, they will quickly identify what areas need to be improved. You can view a copy of our Internal Audit Self Assessment template below.

Once the assessment has been completed, and areas for improvement have been identified, the team should compile a central space for managing this “Improvements Project”. Tools such as Microsoft Team offer easily accessible collaboration tools which are great for cost-effective and small scale project management. Within Microsoft Teams, audit teams can create a To-Do list and allocate responsibility and due dates for each of these items.

Whilst your self assessment will identify what needs to be improved or updated, common items which can be reviewed annually (and therefore, can be added to your to-do list), include:

• Update the Internal Audit Manual
• Update templates (such as the audit report template as formatting can sometimes go astray during the year)
• Allocate audits for the 2022 annual plan
• Review training
• Develop a Learning and Development plan for 2022
  
  

By building you to-do list now, tasks can be allocated to various team members to work on over the December and January period where the office is often much quieter and its a lot harder to execute the audit plan.

My Audit Spot has a range of tools and templates which can help you to successfully execute your to-do list. To access editable versions of all of our templates, you can either purchase templates from our shop, or you can become a member.

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