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Are You Facing an Audit? Ease the Pain with a Web-based BPA Solution
The auditors are coming, the auditors are coming!
A widespread panic suddenly shoots across the psyche of your entire organization.
But guess what? It doesn’t need to.
No matter what you do, having auditors come in to ensure your company complies with all state, national, and international regulations is going to be a stressful time. That stress doesn’t have to turn into panic, though. You can take the edge off the stress audits bring by taking certain steps.
Instead of falling into panic and spending considerable man-hours getting organized, you can implement new solutions. Utilizing web-based business processing automation (BPA) in your business which will significantly reduce preparation for audits and improve your audit outcomes. It’ll also help you improve your overall business performance, save money, and make processing faster and easier.
How a Web-Based Platform Creates Transparency
When auditors sense you are being fully compliant right from the start, you’re laying the foundation for a successful relationship. If the slightest bit of resistance shows itself, then it’s the auditors’ responsibility to continue digging. They need to ask questions and gauge responses until they’re comfortable they have an accurate understanding of the situation.
If you use a web-based solution to track your accounts payable or travel and expenses, you already have 100% transparency in place. Auditors won’t have to dig through your records trying to figure out if you’re hiding anything. All the information they need is right there at their fingertips. With a web-based platform, auditors can:
- Pull any sample size they want and see all the data immediately
- Review all documents, including a comprehensive event and change history, to find answers to any questions they might have
- Validate the entire approval chain
How BPA Eases the Pain of an Audit
One of the things that makes audits so painful for an organization is that they get in the way of normal business operations. However, when you’re using a web-based platform, auditors don’t even have to travel on-site to your business. They could simply examine all your data remotely from their own office.
Even if the auditors are on-site, an organized solution makes life much easier for them and for your organization. You can grant read-only access to your system, providing real-time access to all the information they need to perform a useful, accurate audit. It’s much simpler for them and it means you’re taking less time away from regular work. When auditors perform their analysis on records compiled by your web-based business processing software, they:
- Don’t have to totally derail your system and processes (or processors) for a certain amount of time.
- Will give you an audit score that accurately reflects the controls and procedures you have in place
- Can give you a better audit score because of your thorough, transparent documentation
How A Web-based BPA Solution Helps Avoid Post-Audit Issues
If your business does not do well on an audit you can experience some pretty serious issues, such as taking a credit rating hit. The worst-case scenario involves your company embroiled in legal problems.
The sort of web-based automation platforms that NextProcess offers help standardize and streamline your business processes. They give you an opportunity to strengthen security, improve oversight, and enforce compliance with regulations. Looking into your BPA records lets auditors:
- Verify regulation compliance
- Access accurate information related to your business processes
- Quickly locate any areas where your company needs to improve before they become more serious issues
Choosing a Web-based Solution
Before your next audit, consider how a web-based platform could make the process easier for you and the auditors. If you don’t have process automation yet, now is a great time to start planning on implementing a web-based solution to improve and simplify your business processes.
When you’re looking for a BPA software provider, you’ll want to find one that has a good track record. For example, NextProcess has a near-perfect implementation rate (much higher than the competition) and over 15 years of experience in the field. We also offer transnational pricing to keep costs down and we customize our software to fit your company’s exact needs. Our software is compatible with your existing ERPs and it’s very easy to use, even with no previous experience on similar systems. Plus, if you buy more than one of our automation solutions, they work together to improve overall functionality even more.
If you’re ready to put a web-based BPA solution to work for your company, contact us today. We’ll answer any questions you have and schedule a free demo so you can see first-hand how much our software can improve your business processes and ease the pain of audits.