Auditing software has emerged in response to the growing demand for digitalization. Many businesses have come to appreciate the benefits of leveraging auditing tools to optimize their operational processes and enhance overall efficiency. Implementing such tools requires significant changes in revenue distribution, employee training, and organizational culture. Due to these reasons and many others, organizations have favored allocating their resources to different aspects of their operations.
In recent years, numerous industries have emphasized replacing their manual and paper-based auditing practices with more advanced audit management software to streamline their inspections and audits.
These sectors include hospitality, healthcare, care homes, manufacturing, food and beverage, retail and many more.
Therefore, the emphasis has transitioned from deliberating on adopting auditing tools, to discerning the most right audit management software for your particular business
It’s important to establish what a top-quality auditing software tool should look like for a company. The software must be:
- Cost-effective
- Boast outstanding functionality
- Come with excellent support from the developer
Include features that fulfill all requirements of your company
- And be user-friendly to ensure easy usage and learning for employees, without the need for extensive training.
The purpose of this article is to examine the important features of auditing management software that will make it a worthy investment, save time, and serve as an all-in-one app for your audits and inspections.
How a pandemic-induced acceleration of digital transformation affected the use of auditing software
If you’re in any of the industries mentioned above – hospitality, manufacturing, healthcare, F&B and more – you have seen firsthand the lingering need of digitization during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the post-pandemic period. According to McKinsey & Company, the digitalization transformation was accelerated by ten years during this period in certain countries and industries.
The survey covered a wide range of trends and also highlighted the changes in customer behavior and organizational processes that are likely to persist through the recovery. These changes include meeting customer needs and expectations, greater migration of assets to the cloud, increased use of advanced technology in operations and business decision-making, among others.
Based on our experience with a wide range of clients, we have observed this consistent trend – businesses have an increasing need for innovative solutions in their operations, especially in the area of inspections and audits.
As always, organizations strive to thoroughly understand their operational procedures, overall performance, and customer experience. However, they are now seeking to achieve this objective in a more advanced and comprehensive manner with the help of an auditing management system.
Maintaining control and transparency over business operations is crucial for making informed decisions and driving revenue growth.
We’ve collaborated with one of our esteemed clients, and we’ve written a comprehensive case study for GoAudits and the insights and feedback provided by Oliver Hurst, Director at HSC (Hygiene & Safety Consultants), have validated our hypothesis of the digitalization (especially using an auditing management system) over a business performance and its income:
“GoAudits helped us reduce paperwork, save countless hours and grow our business turnover”
Oliver Hurst, Director at HSC
Read the full case study here: https://goaudits.com/customers/hygiene-safety-consultants/
Key Features to Consider When Selecting an Auditing Software
Feature #1 – Desktop and Mobile Auditing App
An auditing management software that offers both desktop and mobile interfaces can significantly simplify your auditing process. With the ability to start and complete inspections with your phone or tablet on-the-go, as well as delegate tasks easily within your team, you can keep track of progress efficiently while saving time and resources.
Using mobile devices makes it particularly easy to take and attach photos as visual evidence. An efficient auditing software app should offer an easy way to capture, annotate, organize, and share images with minimal effort required.
This visual evidence can be used not only to support findings but also as an effective means of communication. Plus, the desktop version offers real-time visibility of progress and analytics for better business growth forecasting.
Feature #2 – Reports
In the context of auditing and inspection tools, reports serve as a critical source of information that enables users to share their discoveries in a clear and effective manner.
When selecting an auditing software program for this purpose, it is essential to consider the types of reports it can generate. Ideally, the auditing software should provide customizable reports that are concise, comprehensible, and catered to the specific needs of your organization or industry.
These reports should offer:
- Smart scoring
- Automated input
- Real-time insights
- Historical trends and recurring issues
- An overview of corrective actions that are relevant to your business and its objectives.
Here’s a sneak peek of a report that our customers can create with the GoAudits auditing software.
It allows for adding photos, geo-location information of the auditor and user name, and time stamps to save valuable time.
Feature #3 – Tasks and workflows
Once you complete an inspection, you should be able to immediately assign corrective tasks to the right person within your organization. Communicate the issue, priority, and due date clearly to the task owner as part of the corrective action plan.
Implementing a high-quality auditing software management system should enable you to configure email notifications for both approvers and task owners, along with immediate access to audit reports.
A common gap with many auditing management software is that corrective tasks can only be assigned to the users of that software. Make sure that you can assign tasks to people in other departments or even external suppliers, without a need for them to login into an unfamiliar software.
The auditing software should also provide the customized flexibility you need, allowing you and your team to create tailored workflows that outline the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data.
Feature #4 – Real-Time Analytics
Many companies claim to have the best auditing management software that includes the analytics features and smart dashboards. However, to effectively reduce costs and save time with auditing software, you should seek out supplementary features integrated into the analytics feature.
Assess if the tool or platform allows for rule creation for report distribution, task approval, and timely reminders involving the right people.
Once you establish your workflow, an efficient smart dashboard facilitates a thorough overview of audit evaluations throughout various locations, teams, or subjects. With this feature you can detect setbacks and issues on time, while also identifying patterns and trends by instantly seeing your historical data.
Features #5 – Scheduling
How to make sure you maintain consistent standards every day, in every team and location? A simple solution is to plan the audits well in advance, scheduling regular inspections. Create a business calendar of audits, and assign them to the right colleagues or auditors. With a clear plan laid out in advance, people can organize themselves better: everyone will know who is supposed to inspect what, when and where.
Everyone gets busy and may end up pushing audits to the bottom of their to-do list. To help your team conduct regular and frequent audits as planned, you should be able to set up email alerts and reminders. Users should also be able to re-assign or update the status in case the situation on the field has changed.
In essence, the standout features of a high-quality auditioning software include mobile and desktop apps, instant reports, tasks and workflows, analytics, and audit scheduling. However, it’s important to also consider factors such as functionality, user-friendliness, and cost when selecting the best auditing software for your organization.
Why is GoAudits the best auditing software for your business?
Choose the best auditing app to help you with this process, without paperwork and heavy admin workload. Our comprehensive auditing software helps you automate many of the manual tasks involved in the inspection process:
- easier data collection in the field with smart forms
- instant reporting to share audit information quickly, pinpointing every non-conformances or highlighting critical non-conformances
- smart dashboards for real-time analysis
- corrective actions that can be assigned to specific team members, internally or externally
- vast library of audit checklist templates which can be customized, to get started as quickly as possible.
Both your company and the external auditors will be able to access up-to-date information about the performance of your inspections and audits at any time.
The best part? This whole process can be automated. With this approach, you can rest assured that your audits will go through without a hitch and that you’ll get the best results in no time. GoAudits has also been featured by Capterra as one of the highest-rated and most popular software solutions on the market in 2023. Discover more about digital audits with GoAudits here.
