Here we look at just why your business can’t do without professional auditing services if you want to protect yourself from risk and ensure your all important finances are being handled correctly
Giving Financial Controls the Attention They Need
Unless your SME provides financial services, chances are you didn’t get into business because of your knowledge of finance, accounting, tax law, and all of those important things. While you may have decent skill and knowledge in these areas, or have people in your organisation who do a good job of taking care of them for you, activities around tax and financial compliance are not at the core of what your business does. Because of this, they rightly garner less of your attention that doing what you do for your clients and customers, and moving your business forward in the directions you want.
As you might expect, then, this can lead to expensive oversights that can challenge your business if you try to go it alone with the financial side of things. Yes, you should absolutely do your own audits, but use an external auditor too to guarantee the attention to detail you need, and to analyse whether your current processes within the business need to be improved.
Using External Auditors Improves Your Credibility
Businesses who hire external auditors are, in doing so, demonstrating their real commitment to compliance. As you might expect, this does a lot for the credibility of the company, particularly in the eyes of potential investors and partners. You know that you are doing all you can to ensure your business is compliant and well organised, but you can’t expect anyone to take your word for that. By bringing in an auditor, you are showing your business network that you aren’t afraid of scrutiny and that you value financial and regulatory compliance.
Business Improvements Can Make an Audit Pay for Itself
You may think that sticking to your own internal audits is a good way to cut costs, but the overheads associated with hiring an external auditor can often be more than recovered by the process improvements that are made in preparation for an external audit, and on the advice of a third party auditor after the fact. Businesses should look at whether they can make cost savings within their supply chain to offset any extra costs incurred. However, in many cases the benefits of having an external audit in terms of streamlining financial processes make those costs worthwhile. Of course, the cost of a compliance failure can also be far greater than the cost of an audit.
Hiring an auditor used to be something only big companies were thought to need to do, however these days, it is something every SME owner should be strongly considering.
