When purchasing internal audit software, it’s important to look at several areas beyond pricing. While you certainly need to keep budget in mind, implementing a tool just for the sake of its price could be more expensive in the long run if it leads to a lower quality audit. If it’s hard to communicate audit data, for example, then stakeholders might miss certain risks that could end up hurting organizations.
Instead, strong software should streamline audit planning and make it easy to share audit reports so that not just the internal audit function, but organizations as a whole can act on audit findings. So, when purchasing internal audit software, it’s important to also review how different platforms compare across categories like:
1) Data and analytics
One of the most important areas of internal audit software is data and analytics capabilities. A good audit management tool should be able to simplify areas like collecting data, by using APIs to sync up with other risk management tools or finance systems. It should also provide analytics features around areas like visualizing data to identify risks, as well as automating areas like numeric analysis (e.g., Benford’s testing). Otherwise, you might not receive much more value than you would from using Excel.
2) Collaboration
Related to data and analytics capabilities, auditing software should also help facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Strong data integrations with other systems can help internal audit teams understand what’s happening in other areas like regulatory compliance and information security. With everyone on the same page data-wise, internal auditors can then more easily collaborate with these other groups to provide combined assurance and a stronger audit process overall.