What is an External Audit Preparation Workflow and why is it important?
An external audit preparation workflow outlines the necessary steps your organisation needs to go through to successfully prepare for an upcoming external audit.
A thorough and clearly defined external audit preparation workflow will make getting ready for your upcoming audit both straightforward and as stress-free as possible for everyone involved.
A successful external audit preparation workflow will help keep your audit organised and on track and ultimately help your organisation thoroughly impress your auditor.
How to create your own External Audit Preparation Workflow
When initially planning your external audit preparation workflow it is important to always first identify and outline both the scope and objectives you want to accomplish with this process.
For an external audit preparation workflow, your objective is to ensure that your organisation has effectively prepared for an upcoming audit so that it runs as smoothly as possible.
Once the scope and objective have been defined you can now decide what the starting and endpoints of your external audit preparation workflow will be.
In our free example below, we started our workflow with the initial booking of the audit and ended it with a final physical inspection of the site prior to the auditor arriving.
Once you have established your starting and endpoints you can now begin filling in the remaining steps that will be needed before your external audit preparation workflow can be pushed through from start to finish.
Consider the various steps your organisation needs to carry out to ensure that you are comfortably prepared for an upcoming external audit, such as reviewing documentation and briefing all processing staff.
Now you can establish which roles will have responsibilities within your external audit preparation workflow. Consider which employees should be involved, their specific duties and what information they will require to complete the task at hand.
In our template, we have used broad role names such as “Quality Assurance” or “Processing Staff”. However, you may wish to use roles more specific to your organisation.
With Jomo247, customisable roles are incorporated into our workflow designer meaning it is easy for you to create unique roles and establish their responsibilities at each specific step of the process.
Once you finished preparing your process you can now create your workflow template.
You could create a simple image of your template. Alternatively, we always recommend using a software like Jomo247, that will allow you to both design your workflow and automate it.
Once the workflow template has been completed you can now implement your external audit preparation process. It is crucial that you continuously monitor the performance of your new process in case adjustments are required.
The continual improvement of your process is crucial to maintaining compliance and will help impress your auditor on the all important audit day!
