Global audit methodology and technology

Each year, further investment is made in methodology development, technology, training, communications and guidance toward the continuous improvement of audit quality. In 2011, Grant Thornton made a significant investment in education by providing training to member firms globally. This training covered such items as quality monitoring, group audits, auditing revenue, analytical procedures and several other key audit quality topics. We enhanced our supporting audit tools and provided member firms with bulletins on current audit and accounting issues.

Grant Thornton’s global audit methodology provides member firm audit teams with a clear and direct link between identified financial reporting risks, internal controls that address the risks and audit procedures. This approach enables audit teams to judge how the current environment impacts an entity’s financial reporting, how the entity responded, and how to develop an appropriate audit response. The global audit methodology includes integrated quality control processes including, for example, policies and procedures for engagement quality control review.

Grant Thornton applies the global audit methodology using the Voyager suite: an integrated set of proprietary software tools. The suite includes:

• Voyager™ – a tool for assisting audit teams in the identification of financial statement risks and linkage to the processes and internal controls established to address those risks. Voyager also assists audit teams in documenting, evaluating and testing internal controls
• TBeam™ – a trial balance and workpaper software package that is fully integrated with Voyager, allowing audit teams to automatically update lead sheets for changes to the trial balance, perform analytical procedures, evaluate misstatements and create standard and custom workpapers
• Voyager Information System™ (VIS) – an application that provides member firms with the ability to view information about their assurance clients contained in Voyager files; manage and monitor concurring review policies; control and monitor the archiving process for annual and interim periods; and assist with storing archived Voyager files
• Client acceptance™– an application that enforces policies and procedures that each member firm must adopt to accept a new assurance engagement.