Finally, audits can be super fun! Wait...what?

You’ll never hear anyone say that they are looking forward to an audit; however, as correspondence management platforms continue to evolve, auditing and reporting are becoming a much more palatable experience. For example, modern correspondence management platforms give workers the ability to produce digitized audit trails. This allows organizations to keep a detailed and instantly accessible history of who has accessed a correspondence and how it was used. In addition, audit trails supply detailed information for auditors, providing visibility into your processes, and helping to prove compliance.

For the sake of this article, let’s look at auditing and reporting pragmatically—many aspects of a business, such as workflows representing people, requirements, and outcomes, are ever-changing. One of the biggest audit headaches facing employees is the wide variety of requests made by auditors.

Suppose you rely heavily on manual processes to manage your documents. These manual processes potentially result in documents being scattered across your business—in inboxes, on individual devices, filing cabinets, desk drawers, off-site storage, etc. And digital aside, manually assembling papers is not only arduous; more importantly, storing your documents in such a haphazard way can result in frustrated workers and significant compliance violations.

Consider this: What is the cost to your business if a document has been misfiled or lost and is inaccessible to you? Inefficient processes or human errors can, and often do, result in non-compliance. And non-compliance with industry regulations can have serious business, financial, and legal implications.

More—auditors are looking for inconsistencies, inefficiencies, errors, and incidents of unethical conduct in your organizations. A minor mistake can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. A major mistake might incapacitate an organization.

A Correspondence Management Platform provides the ability to create, capture, store, authorize, deliver and manage business-critical correspondences. These documents and data are stored electronically in a central location. Forms, applications, paper documents, electronic files, and schedules can be stored with indexes to create searchable content, allowing you to find and retrieve files in seconds.

Best of all, the right Correspondence Management Platform can integrate seamlessly with your existing business systems—creating a robust and connected ecosystem to track and manage all of your correspondence assets. In addition, by incorporating automated workflows, you can ensure that organizational procedures are consistent. Make your information available to the right people and at the right time.

Audits don’t need to be complicated, time-consuming events. Selecting the right platform and making the aforementioned procedures easy and devoid of complexity—enables seamless management of correspondences across disparate offices, dispersed teams, and multiple environments. As a result, seamless, painless audits can become an easy reality.