Streamline Sales Audit Procedures for Non-Profit Organizations with airSlate SignNow

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another thing that i get all the time is the fear and the anxiety and i kind of find this interesting because people i'm sure you get this too genie well you don't look so frightening as an auditor you don't carry there's a lot of anxiety around going under audit anyway especially if it's your first audit so what what would you tell a non-profit to expect when they're getting ready to undergo an audit maybe what do they need to have prepared or you know just general expectation right it's a it's a great question so the and unfortunately the first time you ever have an audit is probably the heaviest and most labor-intensive audit you'll have to do because and there's a couple of reasons for that um the an initial audit or even if we're taking over from a prior auditor and you're switching firms right either way the standards require us to do a lot of work on what we call beginning balances so let's say you're a calendar year your your january your operating cycle is january 1 to december 31. the auditor has a lot of responsibilities on those january 1 numbers in order to to get our work done so if we've never if we've never performed an audit before we're gonna have to do a lot of extra work there or we're gonna have to work with your prior auditor to find out what they did to to be able to rely on their work from the from the previous year probably more so than that though is if you've never had an audit done before the the auditing standards require that it the the standard is literally called understanding of the entity um and what that means is we have to get to know you we have we have an obligation under our standards to get to know your operations if you think about not-for-profits a a traditional 501c3 we used to call voluntary health and welfare like a social service type organization is really completely different animal than an arts organization the funding is different the types of transactions are different the type of expenses are different so we have to what we have to do in auditing is we have to do what we call a risk assessment process we can't audit every number we'd be there for months and you wouldn't want us to do that and our report says we didn't audit every number it says we looked at things um in all material respects well in order for us to set that threshold and decide how deep do we need to dive we've gotta we've got to understand what you're doing and how you're operating and it's a very comprehensive process on the front end of the audit so if you've never had an audit done before you're going to get a boatload of questions how does how does how do your internal control procedures work who who does what within your office who's in charge of your programs how do your programs work how do these funders work it's it's a lot of a lot of questions a lot of getting to know you so the best thing i think an organization could do to prepare for the first audit they've ever had um in if you have a lot of a good operating procedures um you know we've got we've got policies and procedures for our accounting for our programs and things like that if they're not written down they they're gonna need to be so so go through the exercise of of listing those out get yourself a policy manual if you don't have one already the auditors can use that uh and if you have one and hasn't been updated in a couple of years we understand that we i know the feeling right and even in my own firm we have things that haven't been looked at in a couple years we need to refresh but go through the homework of getting that stuff up to speed it'll really help smooth out that that early stage planning process that the auditors are going to need to go through