SmartSuite for the Audit Committee Chair

Review completed engagements, risk ratings and open findings across finance, IT, operations and compliance audits directly, with dashboards built for committee use rather than reworked from the Chief Audit Executive's deck.

See the risk-based plan from Internal Audit Management alongside progress against it, so questions about coverage of material risks are answered from the plan itself, not from memory.

Granular permissions keep sensitive audit documentation, including findings that touch individuals or investigations, visible only to authorized stakeholders, so the committee works from a controlled record of what was found and who has seen it.

Management's agreed actions carry owners, due dates and verification steps, so you can see which commitments are overdue before the meeting instead of asking the Chief Financial Officer for an update.

SOX Compliance gives the External Auditor permissioned access to testing results and supporting evidence, which supports the independence discussion and shortens the year-end communication cycle.

Audit findings are linked to the risks and controls they concern, so you and the Board Risk Committee Chair are looking at the same records when a finding touches both remits.

Control coverage, testing status, significant deficiencies and material weaknesses are tracked live across the quarterly cycle, so certification readiness is known weeks before the committee has to sign.

Data-driven summaries of assurance activity, significant findings and remediation are produced from source records, and the AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field can draft the narrative the board paper needs.

Approvals, discussions and document versions are retained with each engagement and control, giving a non-executive director a defensible record of what the committee saw and when.

The Audit Committee Chair leads the board committee responsible for the integrity of financial reporting, internal control over financial reporting and the independence of internal and external audit. They set the committee's agenda, approve the internal audit charter and risk-based plan, oversee the external auditor's appointment and performance, review significant findings and management's remediation, oversee whistleblowing and ethics arrangements and report the committee's conclusions to the full board.

SmartSuite lets committee members review engagement results and risk ratings across departments directly in Internal Audit Management, with summarized dashboards built for board use. Rather than waiting for a pack assembled before each meeting, the chair can see which engagements are complete, how each area was rated and where the significant findings are, and go to the underlying engagement when a rating needs explaining. The Chief Audit Executive presents from the same records.

Issues Management shows remediation progress and emerging risk themes from live data, so the chair's oversight of management actions does not depend on a status report prepared by the people being overseen. Each finding carries an owner, a due date and its current state; the chair can see which agreed actions are overdue, which are repeatedly deferred and where the same theme recurs across departments, and put those questions to management with the record in front of them.

SOX Compliance gives the committee visibility of certification status and open deficiencies ahead of the quarter end, rather than at the point of sign-off. The chair can see which controls have been tested, which deficiencies remain open and whether remediation is on track, which is the information needed to challenge the Chief Financial Officer and the External Auditor before certifications are signed rather than after.

The chair reports the committee's conclusions to the full board using concise, data-driven assurance summaries that SmartSuite produces from the audit, SOX and issue records. The summary covers assurance coverage, significant findings and remediation status, and because it is generated from the same data the Chief Audit Executive and Chief Compliance Officer work in, the chair's report and management's account reconcile. The Board Risk Committee Chair can read the same records for shared risk themes.

Committee members need read access to the audit dashboards, SOX status and remediation views, which the internal audit function sets up; they do not need to operate the system. The committee can start using the board dashboards as soon as the audit function's engagements and findings are recorded in SmartSuite; new customers can begin that recording in SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four-week program around one or two priority workflows. Members see current data between meetings, so the agenda the chair sets reflects what has changed since the last one.