What is an Internal Audit Template?
Internal audits are carried out independently by your organisation utilising objective internal personnel, and an internal audit templates will help you achieve them.
Internal audits should be carried out at least once a year and are a requirement of all ISO Standards e.g. see ISO 9001 Clause 9.2. Internal Audits.
Internal audits should be used as a way of evaluating your current system, processes and operations and identifying ways to improve them and ensure your organisation is compliant.
You should build a framework for your internal audit template that is unique and specific to your organisation.
What is an Internal Audit Template and why is it Important?
An internal audit template defines the specific steps required of your organisation to perform a successful internal audit.
The internal audit template is critical for all organisations allowing you to effectively evaluate your compliance and identify any opportunities for improvement.
A robust internal audit process will help your organisation prepare successfully for any upcoming external audits whilst ensuring you will meet the requirements for certification or recertification.
How to Create your own Internal Audit Template Workflow
To create an internal audit template, you will want to start by defining the scope of your internal audit and the outcomes you want to generate.
Creating the workflow template for an internal audit is as important as carrying out the audit itself, as it helps to provide a clear framework that all employees can follow to ensure the process runs as smoothly as possible.
When creating an internal audit template, it is essential that you have a good understanding of your start and endpoints before you define the steps in between.
In our template, which you can download for free below, we chose to include applying corrective actions within our process.
However, you may want to keep your CAPA process separate from your internal audit template.
Next you can begin to outline the steps that need to be accomplished so that your process can move from start to finish.
It is important to understand which steps in your process require conditional logic, as this will impact the progression of the internal audit.
The purpose of an internal audit template is to evaluate compliance and identify areas for improvement within your organisation.
Therefore, you need to think about which steps will ensure your internal audit template produces the most effective outcome.
After this, you need to think about what roles will be involved in your workflow.
Identify who needs to be involved and what their responsibilities are. Then, consider any information they will need to carry out the task effectively.
From this, you can now go on to define specific roles for every step in the task and establish accountability for each step.
Each step might involve a variety of roles, and equally one role might be involved in a variety of steps.
Your roles could be defined in broad terms. For example, you could have role names such “Auditor/s” or “Investigators”.
However, these could also be more specifically tailored to your organisation and the different departments involved.
Once these factors have been considered you can then create your workflow template.
Using Jomo247 to Automate your Internal Audit Template
You could design your audit template on paper or use a digital workflow template builder, like the one offered by Jomo247.
Using a digital programme is more efficient and makes creating, editing, and sharing your template easy.
With Jomo247 once you have created your internal audit template it can then be used to automate this process through our system.
With customisable roles built into our workflow designer it is even easier to control who can take part in and see information regarding each different step.
Once you have created your audit template it is now time to apply the new or revised process.
Always keep track of how your processes are performing in real time in case improvements or changes are required.
Continual improvement of your processes is key to compliance and ensures your operations are running as effectively as they can be.
