BBA joins forces with confirmation.com to speed up auditing for thousands of businesses
Banks, auditors and hundreds of thousands of businesses, charities and other organisations will be able to harness a new online service, BBA Confirmations, to make auditing safer, faster, more secure and less stressful in the New Year. This new service should cut response times by up to 90% saving hundreds of thousands of businesses valuable time.
Whenever a company or other body wants to file their accounts their auditors must send an audit confirmation letter to the entity’s banks – to check that the financial statements’ figures are accurate.
Until now this process has been conducted using the postal service, often posing serious difficulties for the organisation filing its accounts:
– 40% of auditors say they have had to delay signing an audit opinion due to missing confirmations
– 66% of clients have had to contact their bank due to a missing confirmation
– The current system costs European organisations more than £250m a year, auditors say
Which is why the BBA and their preferred technology partner confirmation.com, which is the world’s leading online audit confirmation solution, are introducing a new service that gives banks and auditors greater control of the audit confirmation process.
The new service will allow accountants to upload their audit requests to an online platform enabling banks to respond much more quickly.
This could cut the time taken to confirm an audit from months to a matter of days. It will also provide visibility to customers over how they obtain audit confirmation letters, which are vital to complying with audit regulations. Confirmation.com is already the preferred provider for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and is endorsed by the American Bankers Association.
Anthony Browne, the chief executive of the BBA, said: “This safe new system will pull a key part of the auditing process into the 21st century.
BBA Confirmations is a secure platform that will help banks, businesses, and auditors save millions of hours so they can get back to helping power the economic recovery.”
Chris Schellhorn, CEO of Confirmation.com said: “We are seeing rapid adoption of electronic audit confirmations in the UK and are thrilled to be working with the BBA to provide secure online audit confirmations to its members.”
Samuel O’Connor, commercial director of Confirmation.com UK said: “BBA Confirmations is a no-brainer as it reduces the time it takes to complete an audit confirmation from several weeks to a few days and eliminates costs for all parties.”