We had some feedback from a client recently saying, “...at times we forgot an audit was even happening!” If that’s not the goal in modern audit service delivery, we don’t know what is!

We often drop terms like continuous audit, cloud-native, agile… But what does it all really mean?

Essentially, we use the latest audit systems (including our own proprietary tech), processes and thinking, to make your audit experience as seamless and rewarding as possible for you.

We know this can be hard to imagine for non-customers, especially if they’re used to the old ways in audit land. To them, ‘continuous audit’ sounds like a special circle of hell!

Here are 7 things that make an AssuranceLab audit so painless, you might even enjoy it:

1. Audit management via Pillar

We believe in offering the most simple and agile process when it comes to audits. This is why we created our very own, always-free GRC platform to provide our clients with the best experience possible. 

Pillar provides each client with a kanban style audit board that has been tailored to their specific audit requirements, removing the air of mystery from your audits and putting control firmly back into your hands. Clients have full visibility of their audit requirements and are able to seamlessly communicate with their audit team on an individual control level.

This enables incremental improvement throughout the year as clients work on tightening up their posture in targeted ways at their own pace.

2. Multi-standard approach

One of the best things about Pillar is how easily it enables you to pursue multiple compliance goals simultaneously and make real progress towards each by finding the shortest path to fulfilling all requirements with minimal duplication and fuss.

Start by selecting each goal from the 30+ international standards, frameworks and best practices we cover, and then complete a single assessment workflow to evaluate your current status against each one.

From there, you can work through our agile audits in your own time and collaborate with your auditors and any consultants all in the one place.  

3. Seamless communication

Another recent review said, “...We communicate with them via Slack, which is just so bloody efficient, and they really do feel like an extension of our business…” 

With most of our customers being modern, fast-growing tech companies, it’s no surprise that we often find similarities in our tech stacks and can leverage this to unlock new efficiencies. Slack is the perfect example. 

With Pillar providing total oversight of all controls and requirements, and Slack providing real-time access to our team for any passing thought or question, our customers are able to realise the full benefits of our collaboration and truly build an internal culture of incremental improvement in governance, risk and compliance. 

4. Easy policy generation 

In a world of document templates, borrowing from others and flagrant copy-pasting, tech companies can sometimes overlook the importance of fit-for-purpose policies tailored to their unique context. This is an unnecessary risk!

To look at it more positively, good policies can empower a team to perform more autonomously, efficiently and effectively at scale - while keeping their customers’ data safe and acting within organisational or regulatory boundaries. This is part of the ‘compliance-powered growth’ formula we keep banging on about.

PolicyTree is our new tool enabling customers to generate a set of up to 21 policies, tailored to their unique ways of working, without relying on templates at all. Simply complete a single questionnaire (which takes about 45 minutes) and receive a pack of tailored policies ready for roll out. If you’re on the market for some new documentation, avoid policy-induced stress and give it a go!

5. Proactive by nature 

Anyone who has undergone an audit is probably all too familiar with the associated time-crunch and massive workloads crammed into a short space of time to meet set deadlines.

At AssuranceLab, we do things differently. We’re always working to position our clients' audits up for success, in a way that reduces business disruption. By taking a proactive approach to every audit and getting started at the very beginning of an audit period, we are able to work with our clients year round as their trusted audit partner, allowing them maximum time to provide evidence and samples for testing.

You can even take this one step further and enrol in our continuous audit program, which sets predetermined areas of focus for each month of your audit.

6. Sign-offs done here🙋

Being an accredited CPA and CA firm, an ISO Certification Body (and being certified for other standards), means we can perform the audit and issue your final reports, completely in-house, and allows us to commit to a two-week turnaround from final evidence accepted, to draft report preparation. 

7. Audit completion pack

This part is the cherry on top and helps make the audit experience as rewarding as can be. At the end of an audit, clients receive high-quality marketing assets including certification or attestation ‘achievement badges’ for your web footers and marketing materials. These demonstrate to the world the significant effort you have made to shore up your operations, security practices and posture. 

They can help you tick procurement checkboxes when pitching for enterprise work that could propel you to the next level, or give a regulator confidence in your ability to handle massive amounts of sensitive client data. They can show your users or customers that you care about them, or even secure you an opportunity to share your story in the trade press. 

There’s no telling what compliance-powered growth will look like for you, but we’ll be proud to have played our part along the way!

Contact us to start a conversation about your #compliancegoals today.