The Audit Report |
December
2025 |
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Monthly Commentary |
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Kia ora,
Welcome to December. The Pohutukawa is blooming early this year. We hope you have some rest time planned and get outdoors to see the beauty all around us. We will be on reduced staff and hours from 20th December through to 19th January. As usual we will be available for urgent support and we will be monitoring the systems, but please hold non-urgent work until after 19th.
We are making good progress on our LCE template and plan to demonstrate this at our conference in March. Getting into the details of this standard shows how much more streamlined it is. I suspect auditors will really enjoy this and it will be quickly adopted. We are also working on our new ISA templates which will be available for our existing clients and for our new Australian firms (they didn't adopt LCE). Both styles will include our more detailed Trial Balance and Lead Schedules and integrated risks and tests plus much more.
The line-up for our conference is coming together nicely. We have some great returning favourites including Laura Addinall and Dr Reuben Rusk. Other confirmed presenters include Matt Coulter, new head of Practice Review, Karen Tipper and Misha Pieters from the XRB. We also have Kirsten Dixon, Desere Arbuthnot, Talia Anderson-Town, and Sue Barker presenting. Read more about this on our website and sign up to secure a place. We hope to build on the success of our first conference while sorting out the bugs.
Nga mihi nui,
Clive and the AA team
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News & Technical Articles |
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2026 AA Conference - secure a place |
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Our NZ conference in Christchurch on 5-6 March next year has generated a lot of interest and is actually not that far away! As per last year, this is geared at the SME end of the auditing world. We will be releasing our new LCE template in a joint session with the XRB - very exciting! Tickets are available via our website. The early-bird discount expires on 31 January. |
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AI and the Auditing Profession |
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Clive was recently invited to attend a Technology Quality Management Roundtable hosted by the IAASB and XRB. This was a fascinating insight into the challenges facing the profession and a chance to advocate for smaller firms doing SME assurance work. Our takeaway was for every opportunity there are many unforeseen fishhooks. Read the full article: |
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New website is now live! |
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If you haven't yet done so check out our new website. The team has done a great job pulling this together. There is a clearer, more modern layout and a specific page for the 2026 conference. There are links to access our new status page, our help centre, our online training site, and to log support tickets (if you cannot access Audit Assistant directly for some reason). |
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Training - all done for 2025 |
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As well as our conference in March this year, we have taken about 70 new and existing users through our comprehensive training over 2 days. This has taken place in Apia, Auckland, Christchurch, Hamilton and Wellington. Next year with our Australian release we will be extending this to include some key Australian cities. Remember that we also have recorded training on our training portal, including some great material from the 2025 conference (see link below). |
| Find out more |
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Content and feature updates |
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Notification centre |
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The team have just made an update to add options to personal notifications received. This allows users to select how they receive notifications such as updates to shared pages or requests, or new/updated follow-ups and review notes. Users may specify optional email notifications. Going to the notifications option in the user profile provides a space to toggle these on or off. This will be in full release later this week. |
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New schools template for y/e 31 December 2025 |
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Many school auditors are starting their work for the new year. As we mentioned last time our updated template is now good to go, and you will notice a prompt to upgrade. We are currently reviewing and updating the standard management points library for schools as there were a number of points in there that referenced the old Education Act. Follow the link for full details of the new template. Note that we have fixed the issue of a subpage (testing table) branching off of page H3 that was being referenced to the T section. This should remedy all such issues, but if you do see anything strange please let us know. |
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Issues with requests being addressed |
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A couple of annoying bugs on the Requests feature have now being addressed. When a client added a comment to a risk, there was no indication that their comment had been saved. Now they get a green tick so it is clear that this is done. Also, when a request is sent by the auditor it does not show as sent until the page is refreshed. This issue should be fixed shortly. |
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Issue on Audit Summary Information (Z1) page fixed |
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We noticed that the prompt for a comment on each medium, high and signicant risk identified on the Audit Summary Information page was no longer showing. The idea was that a summary of the results of work done and findings on each risk was to be included for partner review before the page could be signed off. With the prompt (a text box) no longer visible some users were adding their own comment box, which did the same thing, or just ignoring this and signing off the page. This is now fixed. Each risk has a comment/follow up option assigned, and the risks are now numbered properly. |
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SPFR for FPE hyperlinks corrected |
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A user pointed out that in our special purpose for-profit template links to the standard were accessing the original 2014 version not the updated 2018 version. It turns out we had updated the actual checklist to the 2018 details, but just forgot the hyperlink update. This has now been fixed. |
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Tips, Tricks and Questions |
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Why is the text in some comments boxes smaller? |
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There are normal comment boxes and notes (or sub-comments) produced from a prompt within a comment. Notes are in a smaller font to indicate that they are sub-comments on the item above. |
| Find out more |
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How do I edit my phone number? |
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When we last updated our profiles interface we neglected to include a field for updating user phone numbers. This has now been fixed. Just click on your user profile and edit your name, email and phone. |
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Can I add emojis to comments? |
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Yes! This can be a useful way to draw the eye to a comment, for example by adding a green tick. Our upcoming new content boxes will also add much more detailed formatting options. |
| Find out more |
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Have Your Say |
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Audit Assistant's feedback board allows users the ability to post suggestions for new content and new feature ideas. This now automatically records the name of the submitter, allowing more meaningful interaction. Please add your comments to existing suggestions and add new ideas. We feature a new suggestion each month: |
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Ability to add additional deadlines |
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A user suggests that it would be great to be able to add additional deadlines in between the preset deadlines i.e. planning completion date, planning review to be completed, execution to be started etc. Do you agree? |
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