Risk Register Template.

Your business is susceptible to many risks, and the type of risks which may be relevant to you are constantly evolving and changing. Some risks may be within your control, and others entirely outside of your influence. The impact of your risks will also change each year and the mitigations you can put in place to reduce the risk may also change depending on how significant the risk is and your company’s risk threshold.

This constantly evolving environment makes managing risk a challenge, and it is something which we cannot afford to get wrong. As many aspects of the business depending our risk framework and knowing what could go wrong (and how wrong), its important that we have in place a solid tool and framework for managing risk within the business.

Enter the Risk Register Template.

Risk can be managed in a variety of ways. Organisation’s can have a fully integrated system, linking compliance, audit and risk neatly together to provide a full enterprise risk solution. Alternatively, organisations can manage risk through a consolidated spreadsheet, or individual spreadsheets for each entity or business area.

Regardless of how risk is managed, its important to ensure there is a consolidated view which allows for risk to be compared between years (and between business areas), and is supported by a strong methodology which reduces bias or judgement when determining the overall level of risk.

My Audit Spot has developed a risk register template which can be used either at the entire organisation level, or across individual subsidiaries or business areas.

The Risk Register developed by My Audit Spot has also been designed to integrate with the Audit Universe and Audit Dashboard tools; allowing a rudimentary way of linking risk and audit together.

The My Audit Spot Risk Register template compromises of the following fields:

· Risk

· Impacted business areas / subsidiaries

· Inherent risk rating

· Residual risk

· Likelihood of impact

· Action taken to mitigate risk

· Overall risk score

The template has been built with a range of excel formulas to help ensure a consistent approach to calculating risk, however does provide Risk Directors with the opportunity to include adjustments to better reflect the current level of risk. Where adjustments are applied, there is space to ensure an explanation is provided; ultimately helping give context to the final rating and ensuring that no knowledge or loss is forgotten.

As the template is in Excel, it can be easily customised. It would be recommended to include columns which state the customer impact and the financial statement impact associated with a particular risk should it likely eventuate.

You can review a free copy of the risk register here, or you can purchase the editable version by clicking here.

My Audit Spot members have access to the template in the Members Area of the site. Want to become a member and access all of our templates? Click here to lean more.

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