Potentially messy and often time-consuming, any type of audit can be a distraction to the core finance and accounting team. Outsourced audit support services experts make the experience less onerous and less stressful, while preparing the company for the audit and being there throughout the entire process, as needed. By bringing in expertise they do not have on staff and being ready for the scrutiny of auditors, companies can minimize the overall time and costs involved in their audit and keep any risk to their financing compliance requirements to a minimum.

What Are Audit Support Services?

Audit support services primarily fill a temporary yet essential need—outside experts who can represent the company as a liaison with the auditors. Experts who can jump in and become a part of the team learn the ways and needs of the company quickly and can fill this role seamlessly. Ideally, they are brought in before the audit process begins, to assess how ready the books and records are to support an audit and prepare for any questions that are likely to arise.

How Can Audit Support Services Benefit Your Company?

Audit support services primarily ensure that the audit process will go as smoothly as possible, by making it so someone with the right level of knowledge and experience can answer questions on the company’s behalf and get the answers to the auditor as efficiently as possible. With this essential role covered, the rest of the finance and accounting team can focus on their main responsibilities and not become distracted by an audit that could be prolonged.

Whether you are nearing an audit of a financial statement or just getting started on a first-time audit for an emerging growth company, you want it to be done right. Audit support experts who have helped similar companies in similar situations will ensure that appropriate supporting documentation is in place, audit schedules are prepared correctly and any questions are properly addressed.

Audit support services experts start by getting to know the company client and understanding what their external auditors are going to expect. They will anticipate any troublesome issues that may come up and work on solutions for addressing them before the auditors start their inquiries. They may take a close look at journal entries, technical memos, accounting policies—any area that opens up the risk of a messy audit and potentially could be buttoned up ahead of time. It’s better to fix any issues beforehand, to minimize auditor hours, disruption, and surprises.

Key benefits of using audit support services include:

• Addressing a company’s lack of audit expertise, a common need for companies undergoing a financial statement audit for the first time.
• Supplementing the bandwidth of an already stretched thin finance team.
• Addressing record keeping that is not “audit ready,” such as completing account reconciliations, preparing technical accounting memos for complex or unusual transactions, and documenting accounting policies.
• Achieving cost efficiencies for the overall audit.

Different Types of Audit Support Services

When looking into audit and compliance services, experts with specialized skill sets and experience help in anticipation of an audit, and during and after an audit, as needed:

• Pre-audit reviews: External audit support services can involve cleaning up the books, and applying an auditor-like viewpoint to your recordkeeping, with the intention of resolving any issues before the actual audit. Several benefits can be realized when expert consultants conduct pre-audit reviews, including:
  • No disruption to the audit: When the books are cleaned up ahead of time, the audit is more likely to proceed as scheduled and not become a dragged-out effort. Consequently, there’s less risk of facing turnover in the external audit team and having to get new people up to speed on your business.
  • Fewer audit adjustments: Messy audits lead to cost overruns—preventing issues ahead of time will shrink the risk of having to make adjustments later and the costs that come with that.
  • Less risk of a material weakness finding because of too many audit adjustments.
• Audit support liaisons: These consulting experts can touch base with the auditors early on in the process and go through the PBC (or prepared by client) list of schedules and other documents to understand the auditors’ areas of focus and start formulating responses that will meet the auditor’s expectations. There may be some back and forth and negotiations involved in finalizing what information will be shared and what format it will take, and the audit support services team can handle that on the company’s behalf.
• Internal audit support: Completely separate from the support offered for an external audit, internal audit services can fill critical needs, such as a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to bring to light both issues and opportunities the company may be missing.
• Support for audits of internal controls over financial reporting: SOX experts can help companies with their risk assessment, materiality, design of controls and testing of operational effectiveness, all in preparation of the first time they will undergo a SOX audit, and then assist the company with any questions from their external auditor.

How to Find the Best Audit Support Service for Your Business

Much like an auditor of any discipline is going to ask you thoughtful questions, you want to be prepared to ask a potential audit support service provider questions that will help you understand the level of their consultants’ expertise, the process involved, and how much of the lift they can take off your team’s shoulders. What types of audit services do they offer? Do they seem genuinely curious about your company? Can they share examples of other companies like yours that they have helped? How will they communicate with you if there are any issues that arise before or during the audit?

The audit support services experts at ZRG are ready to answer these types of questions and more. To properly prepare for your next external audit or a SOX audit, or to take on an internal audit project, see how ZRG can help.

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