How to Maximize Audit Efficiency with Minimal Resources

If your organization is struggling to keep up with increasing audit demands, it’s likely not due to a single issue. Rather, multiple issues combine to affect efficiency and threaten negative (or even detrimental) consequences.

Unfortunately, credit unions and their auditing teams don’t have the resources to fix every existing problem at one time. It’s key to prioritize changes that have the potential to yield the biggest impact.

 Here, the problem lies in identifying the areas with the most potential to improve efficiency with the resources available.

Determining Efficiency Potential

In our work with credit union auditors, we’ve discovered that one of the most significant issues affecting auditing teams and preventing growth is time management. There’s simply not enough time to accomplish all of the auditing work teams face daily.

While you can’t magically create more time in which to accomplish auditing activities, you can majorly shift the focus on the type of work being done. Auditing work typically falls into one of two categories:

1. Skills-based substantive work
2. Tedious administrative minutia

Auditing teams often get caught up in administrative work and devote a majority of their time—around 60& of it on average—to tackling administrative tasks like:

• Maintaining spreadsheets,
• Collecting documents,
• Status follow-ups,
• Sending reminders, and
• Other related tasks.

These activities are necessary to keep the auditing department (and the credit union as a whole) operating smoothly, but they don’t contribute to innovation and growth. Cutting back on the amount of time spent performing administrative tasks will allow auditing talent to focus on work that utilizes skill, expertise, and specialized training. This results in more meaningful audit work accomplished without stretching staff thin.

Reducing administrative task time offers immediate savings that can be reallocated to more relevant work like planning, strategizing, performing testing, analyzing data, validating findings, and other, more productive operations.

The question then becomes how credit unions can decrease the effort spent on clerical tasks.

How to Reduce Administrative Tasks

It’s impossible to reduce the number of tasks that must be done. Neglecting the administrative minutia to focus on substantive activities will only further back up auditing operations and negatively impact the organization in the long run. Instead, credit union auditors can strategize for, streamline, or fully automate many of the time-consuming administrative tasks by implementing different kinds of tools.

Need help picking a tool? Consult the Audit Efficiency Matrix below, a tool developed by Redboard to help credit union auditors increase auditing efficiency with minimal disruption.

The Audit Efficiency Matrix can help you determine the fundamental differences between types of efficiency tools and which kind is right for your organization’s needs, as well as how to measure the success of the solutions once they’re implemented.