Time for timesheets.

Why your internal audit team should be completing weekly timesheets

Don’t get me wrong. I hate timesheets as much as the next guy. It ruins your Friday, as you’re ready you go home and then all of a sudden you get that pesky reminder email and next thing you know, your 15 minute early mark is all of a sudden taken away as you’re stuck in the office recalling everything you did over the last week.

It’s annoying, frustrating and also worrying (are you going to get caught for that 2 hour lunch break with your friends), but reality is, those timesheets are actually very important.

​​
For everyone who has worked in practice, timesheets had the connotation of being used as evidence against you come your year end performance review. It also showed formed a critical part in how much was billed to the client. Yet for in house internal audit, the same thoughts of timesheets don’t need to exist, and here’s why.

They help with annual planning

By recording time, we are able to see how much time it actually takes to complete an audit. Too often do audit functions present a plan to the audit committee which is a little bit blind. We assume how much time it’ll take to complete a review, and this in turn come sometimes lead to poorly scoped audits in an attempt to deliver the entire plan, or informing the audit committee that some reviews are now going to have to be dropped.

Once we know how much time it actually takes to complete a review, we can build a more appropriate annual plan which can be achievable and realistic.

It shows where we can improve

If we’re spending too long on audits or we’re consistently missing KPIs, this will be reflected through our time reporting. For instance, if we regularly struggle to have audit reports signed in a timely manner and our reporting phase of an audit has a lot of time charged to it, it could reflect issues in our report writing or finalisation processes. Once we know this, we can then offer tailored training to help the audit team write better reports and finalise reviews quicker.

It supports resourcing constraints

Budgets are always sensitive topics, particularly if requesting more money. But timesheets can show how under resourced your team may be, and provide evidence to support your need for headcount. Furthermore, it’ll show where you need additional team members; junior level, middle, or manager level… timesheets will help you with your decision.

However there is also a more sinister side to timesheets. It’s my personal belief that timesheets should note be used for this reason.

We have developed a set of templates (including instructions), which can help you to implement a simple yet effective timesheet and reporting process in your audit team. You can view the free templates here or you can purchase the editable template here.

Timesheets are a tricky thing, and that is why it is extremely important that timesheets are introduced in a sensitive manner. It is important that team members are aware that timesheets are to help better plan, and that monitoring their hours is not the primary purpose.