Use Microsoft Dynamics GP to Take the Pain and Expense Out of CPA and Bank Audits

CPA and bank audits can easily become extremely expensive business propositions--what I normally refer to as "necessary ailments". Financial audits can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and typically involve internal accounting resources (and perhaps other staff members) which may become strained with keeping up with day-to-day activities while assisting auditors in producing reports and recovering physical documents.

The experience of one of my customers was similar to a disorganized fire drill: the bank and CPA auditors would come in, typically every quarter, reclaim some office space, hook up some laptops, lay out some paperwork on a desk, and begin to request copies of invoices, proof of deliveries, aging reports, and purchase orders. At the same time, my client's already overworked accounting staff would storm the filing cabinets to search for the corresponding documents produced during the past three months, hoping they could find all of them in the organized chaos they had created for themselves.

Why do financial and bank audits become such a crisis at some organizations? The main problem usually boils down to a lack of basic document management capabilities. Staff members in most accounting departments spend 80% of their time researching and compiling information in the form of invoices, purchase orders, contracts, etc., for auditors--information that should be readily available from their ERP system.

Microsoft Dynamics GP has the capability to store images of contracts, invoices, and purchase orders at the window and record levels via the implementation of OLE containers, which can all be centralized on a network for ease of access by all authorized members of the organization. An OLE container, in OLE compound document technology, is nothing more than a client application holding linked or embedded objects. These objects can be in the form of ...