My Annual Test

I work for a non-profit and in order to qualify for workplace giving campaigns (and other reasons) we have an independent audit of our financial records every year. As the bookkeeper, it's my responsibility to prepare documents for the audit and to answer the auditors' questions while they're at our office testing our paperwork and procedures.

The fieldwork was this past week (one of the reasons for being absent from this space all week). All three of the auditors who came to the office were ones who did the audit last year. It was nice to have the same people because they were somewhat familiar with our operation so they didn't have to ask as many questions. Plus I like all three of them and I find it easy to communicate with them (which has not been so true in the past).

I've never had any formal training in accounting or bookkeeping so I depend on the audit to teach me how I can do my job better. This year we focused on our procedures for incoming funds, payroll, authorizing expenditures, etc. It's important that certain responsibilities are kept separate so one person doesn't control too much. In a small non-profit, it's often hard to have enough people to keep things separated. I tend to be in charge of a little bit too much and therefore there's potential for fraud. In our internal culture of trust, we tend to scoff at those risks but that's why we have the auditors -- to keep that risk at a minimum.

I feel really good about the audit this year. I felt more confident in my answers to their questions and didn't feel like I had to pass them over to my boss for more complete or accurate responses. I also made an effort to improve my audit documents and to get advice from the auditors on how I can help make their fieldwork more efficient.

They didn't find any adjustments that had to be made which means that all the items that they tested were done correctly. I'm sure we'll have some recommendations from them on how we should improve our procedures, especially for decisions regarding how funds are spent. It's often been just me and my boss making those decisions but with our new organizational structure we have department directors who will be doing most of that. So our authorization procedures have to change, but that was in the works already.

It'll be an interesting year coming up with all the changes and I hope when my annual test comes around next summer I'll be just as pleased with the results.