The Audit Report |
June
2025 |
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Monthly Commentary |
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Welcome to Winter!
For those of you who have been completing school audits, we hope you have been making good progress. We have received a lot of feedback and suggestions on the new Schools template. We plan to have a debrief after June and make a plan for improvements for next year. In the meantime please send your feedback.
Our new master template is coming along well. This is our biggest rewrite ever – taking into account all the suggestions we have received over many years. We are adding a lot of features to reduce repetition and make maintaining the templates easier, as well as automatic flagging when a risk needs to be considered, plus linking in risk responses through the file much more effectively. We are also rethinking the order of work and how client questionnaires work to reduce the need to jump between pages so much, and prompt more useful client responses.
We continue to fine-tune our V3 interface in response to feedback. Please switch over if you haven't yet done so.
Have a great June,
Clive and the AA team
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News & Technical Articles |
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What's wrong with AI? |
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Picking up on a theme that Clive discussed briefly at the conference in March, here he talks about the impact of AI on auditing, on our workplace culture, and on our minds. Much has been said about positives - here are some of the negatives - and why we are only adopting tools that are transparent to the auditor. |
| Read More |
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Model financial statements |
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We have compiled a collection of model/illustrated financial statements from the usual suspects - BDO, KPMG, and PWC. Plus links to CAANZ for the SPFR for FPE (which never changes) and to the new XRB Excel template for preparing Tier 3 Performance Reports in termsof the new standard. Follow the link to see our page with all the details. |
| Read More |
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Introducing Our New Trial Balance Import Tool |
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Our new trial balance import tool is available in the V3 interface. You may have used it. Previously, importing a trial balance required exact column names for recognition, making the process rigid and sometimes frustrating. With our new tool, you can now upload trial balances with any column names and easily map them to the required fields. |
| Read More |
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Auckland new users training - plus get your CPD hours! |
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We have some new users in Auckland so we hope to schedule training in the next month or so. Let us know if you are interested in being a part of this.
Need some more hours by 30 June? We have some great content from our conference.
You can watch the bits that are relevant as we now have broken these down into topical segments of about 1.5 hours each. See our training site. Or if you attended the conference check out some of our other content. |
| Contact Us |
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Content and feature updates |
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Template names update to standard approach |
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We have standardised our naming conventions for templates – which will hopefully making finding the correct templates easier. We now start with the reporting standard, followed by the job type, followed by the year (e.g. Tier 3 NFP Audit (2024)). This was already how most of our newer templates were named, but we have now applied this across the board. See how this has been applied to historical financial audits in the article below. |
| Read More |
Updates to community page and dashboard |
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We are pleased that use is being made of our Community area on our dashboard. The purpose is to allow users to post questions of as general or specific nature related to their work which other users may be able to answer or add comments or links which may be of interest to others. We have updated the layout of the dashboard to make this area more accessible, including adding the poster's profile picture. Check it out and give it a go. The community page may also be accessed directly from the link below. |
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Updates to audit reports and engagement letters - "material" instead of "significant" |
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NZ IAS 1 Presentation of Financial Statements was updated a while back to state that only material accounting policy information needs to be disclosed (for financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2023). We had updated the checklists but this was not reflected in all our audit reports or engagement letters. Previously the language referred to "significant accounting policies." We have now updated our audit reports and engagement letters to reflect this wording. See below for a link to the CAANZ article. |
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Update to ctrl + shift + arrow |
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A user advised that when they press the control + shift + key plus arrow the programme was wanting them to leave the page they were on rather then selecting the words to the left or right as Word does. This has now been changed to emulate Word. |
| Read More |
API for integration with other systems |
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The team has now completed our API (Application Programming Interface). This opens the possibility of deep integration with other systems, such as team and workflow management. Contact us if you would like to find out more. |
| Read More |
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What is the best way to handle consolidations? |
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Using crtl+k then typing the letter of the section will shortcut to the relevant page (e.g. ctl+k then V will bring up the V1 Equity page in the search bar). This is an alternative to scrolling through the sidebar index. |
| Find out more |
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Which template to use for ECE audits? |
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Some Early Childhood Centres must provide General Purpose Reporting, and others may report in terms of Special Purpose single statement reports. The link below describes which template to use. |
| Find out more |
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Where do I now find pending work? |
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After some feedback and consideration internally, we realised the "pending work" page in the sidebar is not as useful as we initially imagined. So we have moved these to the bottom. |
| 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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Closing a request without deleting it |
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A user asked if when a client fails to respond to a request, or responds by email or verbally is it possible to close it without deleting it so that the query is not lost or left open? What do you think? |
| Vote or Comment |
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