Audit manager - having lunch or dinner with client

Over the years, the auditors of myauditing.blogspot.com realized that auditing is essentially a service industry. It's important to manage client's expectation whilst ensuring that the financial statement is not materially stated from the prevalent accounting standard. Works got easier and smooth, when both auditor and audit client move in the same direction and are on good term.

As such, it is important to develop or forge strong client relationship with the audit client. We realized that it's a lot easier to forge relationship over lunch, instead of formal face-to-face meeting. We are not discouraging of having formal meeting. However, we are encouraging to have informal lunch with client - in a lunch set-up, where both the auditor and audit client can talk about personal matter, instead of accounting and auditing matters.


Audit fee discussion got a lot easier when both parties are on the same good term.


Hence, the auditors in myauditing.blogspot.com always ensure that at least a lunch is being organized for each audit client. This is part of client relationship management that worth investing your time and some money.


What is your thought - hope to hear from other auditors within the world. How do you forge stronger client relationship?

Discipline is needed for the auditors, especially audit manager, who is manaing portfolio of client

Throughout the years, with the progress and promotion in the audit career - from audit staff to audit senior to audit manager... - we realized that being discipline is important for an audit manager to manage its portfolio of clients.

Depending on the workload, an audit manager may assigned to manage at least 10 client groups and there are managers who are managing more than 50 client groups, where the size of each client groups varies. It's important to be discipline to plan the audit, execute the audit, review the audit working papers, resolve the accounting issues and close the audit immediately.


Procrastinating, which is a no-no habit in life, would result in delay in audit, overtime hours to be incurred by audit team and audit manager himself/herself. If the audit manager don't carry out his/ her work diligently in a discipline manner. Audit progress may goes beyond the audit team's control - for instance, delay in review by audit manager would causes the client to miss its filing dateline. There will be spill over effect for other audit engagements that are on-going on the same period.


In life, it's important to plan, to execute and be discipline and diligent.

Auditors' are not infallible - Article from The Edge -

We came across this article in The Edge with the title of Auditors, like anyone else, are not infallible:


http://www.theedgemarkets.com/en/article/auditors-anyone-else-are-not-infallible


What the article said is quite true - where the auditors can't guarantee everything within the company is "all right" even though a clean unqualified audit opinion has been issued. However, the market perception seems to be like the company "is ok" since it has been audited and clean audit opinion has been issued?


WHat can be done to change this market perception ?

Audit manager and audit partner - EQ - managing emotion or temper

Auditors are subject to tremendous stress, as you are responsible to opine on a set of financial statements, which could be subject to lot of reviews or scrutiny or subject to reliance. A bankers place reliance on the financial statement to evaluate the capability of your audit client to repay, public investor rely on the financial statement to evaluate the investment decision. A audit partner need to carry out the audit in accordance with relevant auditing standard and need to defend on their audit opinion on areas that require significant judgement.


Pressure can cause audit partner and audit manager to have emotionally bad day. A distressed audit partner or audit manager need to watch their communication and interaction with different parties carefully to ensure that the emotion or temper is controlled and surrounding others are not affected.


To illustrate,


Audit partner or audit manager should not whack a subordinate without any reason just because you are having a bad day!


Learn how to control your emotion or attend anger management  class or leave the office immediately if you feel that you going to explode.


Short post but hope the audit partner or audit manager can learn.