A stress free audit

The aim of this blog is to share some hints and tips with you as to how you can make your year end audit easier and more efficient, and less stressful for all involved.

It all starts with planning, and a timetable that allows all enough time to complete the relevant work. You need to start at the end point, usually the board and audit committee dates and work back from there. We would strongly recommend that enough time is left in between finishing the audit fieldwork and the date for documents to be distributed for committee consideration, to allow any late queries to be addressed, and enough time for management to address any actions they may have.

Early questions

As part of your own year end processes, and indeed throughout the year, we would encourage you to address any issues that you are not sure about with your audit team in advance of the year end. This ensures that the year end process and audit is just confirming treatment as discussed in the year, and does not mean decisions are being made after periods closed, or even worse action have been taken that ESFA approval would have been required. The sort of items we would recommend you discuss throughout the year include ((but not limited to):

• New, one off income streams
• Settlements and redundancy payments – to ensure AFH compliance
• New leases or agreements
• Property transactions
• Any transaction that could be considered novel or contentious
• Potential Related Party Transactions

If you have any unusual transactions that you need to speak to use about, documentation will be key to protecting the Trust should there be questions raised from public, press or regulators (and us as auditors!).

Year end processes

If you are part of a MAT, it is important to collate information in one consolidated basis. The schools are all one legal entity and must be reported as much. If schools do an element of the year end process themselves, consider training staff on the requirements and expectations for the year end.

Review the year end file that Bishop Fleming prepare, and complete all relevant sections. Information that has been asked for is either required to ensure that accounts disclosures can be completed, or information that we know we will need to examine as part of the audit. Having this completed in advance of the audit is vital and means that queries raised during the audit will be on specific audit matters rather than chasing known information.

To help enable all to understand the accounts better, we would also recommend that all year end adjustments are processed to your system before submitting to us to prepare the accounts. This ensures that we need to make the most minimal of adjustments and that the numbers you get back in the year end accounts will not need a significant reconciliation that can worry Trustees.

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