No One Loves a Good Audit
Even with all the change and challenges we’ve just gone through – even with the absolute imperative that businesses must see, manage, and attempt to save every cent they can – organizations are still loath to look at their audit processes. Sure, they’d like to review 100% of their expense reports to make sure they’re not riddled with mistakes or rife with fraud, but the very act of auditing is time-consuming and expensive.
Plus, audits might point out things you don’t want to think about. Like addressing your processes.
But what are the costs of crossing our fingers and hoping for the best? What do we risk as businesses if we ignore the real-world economics lesson of COVID-19 and let things slip back to pre-pandemic practices? What if we don’t check ourselves (or, at the very least, examine what our employees are spending)?
Well, our first thought might be of the fines and fiascos we risk if we fall out of compliance. Or the costs we incur by not paying attention to human error or human greed, both of which show up on expense reports with relative frequency.
Some would argue, however, that the real costs of lapsing into status quo show up when we start to fall behind.
Businesses learned resiliency in 2020. It’s time now to learn reinvention. Rededication. Recommitment to re-evaluating how we get work done. We need to be willing to shed our systems of inefficient processes and commit to continuous improvement. Because if we don’t, we’re not going to be able to adapt to continuous change and challenge.
And there will be continuous change and challenge.
This again is reason enough to embed intelligent spending reviews throughout your processes. And it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of AP to stay on top of every audit – they have more important work to do, they don’t have the time to do anything extra, and they don’t want to ask their supervisor why she spent $3,200 on “office supplies” last week.
You, on the other hand, want to give them the help they need.
The solution is found in the combination of intelligent technology and expert review. (Remember, that’s just one part of the larger solution we’re talking about here: The Commitment to Continuous Improvement.) You still want people with eyes on the page – you just want to make sure they’re backed by artificial intelligence and machine learning tools which ensure that every critical charge from every expense report receives the right scrutiny.
It’s a two-part approach that can’t possibly be cost-effective, can it?
It can. According to this Audit tip sheet, which offers five ways audits can help fuel growth – pointing out issues before they damage your bottom line or lead to non-compliance. There’s even a simple formula to help calculate what audits will cost your organization and what kind of ROI you’ll see when automating and outsourcing the process.
And while you might not love the idea of auditing everything, everyone loves making sure things are done right.