SmartSuite for the Audit Director

Every auditable entity holds its risks, controls and prior findings, so the annual plan is built by ranking the universe against enterprise risk assessments rather than by rolling forward last year's list.

Templates, testing steps and documentation standards are applied consistently, so the Audit Quality Assurance Reviewer finds the same structure in each file and your methodology survives staff changes.

Resource Management shows assignments and workload across engagements, so you can see where an Audit Manager is overcommitted and move work before fieldwork dates are missed.

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) holds the register the Enterprise Risk Director maintains, so when a risk score changes the plan can respond rather than waiting for next year's cycle.

Observations attach to specific risks and controls, giving the Head of Internal Controls and the Compliance Director the same records to work from when a finding crosses into their remit.

Document requests go out with owners, deadlines and automated reminders, so engagement teams spend fieldwork on testing rather than on follow-up email to process owners.

Issues Management holds every finding with an owner, a due date and a verification step, so you can distinguish actions closed on evidence from actions merely marked done before the committee pack is due.

Dashboards show trends across operational, IT, finance and compliance audits, so you can tell leadership which themes keep returning and where remediation has not actually worked.

When you stand in for the Chief Audit Executive, board-ready dashboards and briefings drafted with the AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field come from the same engagement records, so nothing has to be reassembled for the meeting.

Chief Audit Executive

The Audit Director owns the risk-based audit plan and the audit universe, resource allocation and capacity across engagements, the audit methodology and its quality checkpoints, and the oversight of open findings to effective remediation. They monitor fieldwork and review cycles, provide leadership with continuous assurance dashboards and deputize for the Chief Audit Executive with committees. In SmartSuite the plan, universe, engagements and findings sit together in Internal Audit Management.

SmartSuite builds dynamic risk-based audit plans in Internal Audit Management, tied to enterprise risk assessments, with an audit universe that holds every auditable entity and its risk and control relationships. The director draws on the enterprise risk register in Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) for planning, so coverage follows risk: when a risk rating changes, the entities it relates to are visible and the plan can be revised rather than rebuilt at year end.

Resource Management lets the director allocate auditors across the engagements in the plan and see capacity against commitments, while Internal Audit Management shows fieldwork progress and review cycles for each engagement. Together they answer the two questions the director is asked most, whether the plan is on track and whether the team can absorb an unplanned request, from the same records the Audit Managers update as work proceeds.

Open findings are tracked in Issues Management with action owners and resolution deadlines, and escalation when a deadline passes. The director sees all findings across engagements in one place, with aging and status, so overdue or repeatedly deferred actions surface without a round of emails. Dashboards highlight recurring issues, which is how the director judges whether remediation is effective or the same weakness is being closed and reopened.

The Audit Director provides leadership with dashboards from SmartSuite highlighting audit progress and recurring issues, and the Chief Audit Executive reads the same views to prepare for the audit committee. Because Audit Managers, the Audit Analyst and the Audit Quality Assurance Reviewer all work in Internal Audit Management, the director's view of plan status, findings and quality is current without collecting updates. The same view supports work with the Enterprise Risk Director and Head of Internal Controls.

The function's own methodology, templates and quality checkpoints are configured into the engagement workflow rather than replaced, so auditors follow the steps the director has set and the Audit Quality Assurance Reviewer can check against them. New customers can start with SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four-week program around one or two priority workflows. For an Audit Director the first is the audit universe: load it, map it to enterprise risks and bring in the current plan and open findings. Engagements already in progress can be recorded at their current stage.