An annual audit observes, after the fact, what happened over twelve months. Continuous monitoring watches your operations and key controls all year: anomalies are detected and dealt with when they occur. In Burkina Faso it takes the form of outsourcing the internal control and internal audit function, which few organisations can maintain on their own. CFEC-Afrique provides it with a dedicated team and tools that extract your data, test all your transactions and alert a named owner. This is “monitoring”, one of the five components of the COSO framework, put into practice.
The tools of continuous monitoring
Automatic extraction
Your accounting, banking and management data is extracted at regular intervals, with no re-keying.
Tests on every transaction
Each control rule is applied to all transactions, with the support of our in-house AI, not to a sample.
Alerts
An anomaly triggers an alert, sent to a named owner.
Dashboard
Management can see at any time the state of the controls, the open anomalies and how they are being dealt with.
What we do
- Full or partial outsourcing of the internal control and internal audit function.
- Risk-based annual internal audit plan, approved by your management or your audit committee.
- Mapping of the processes, risks and key controls to be monitored.
- Configuration of the monitoring tools: data extraction, test rules, alert thresholds.
- Continuous tests on all transactions: purchases, payments, payroll, treasury, stock, fixed assets, grants.
- Follow-up of exceptions: analysis, classification and remediation plan.
- On-site reviews, cycle counts and thematic internal audit assignments.
- Regular reporting to management, the board, the audit committee or the donor.
- For banking institutions within scope, review of controls and prudential reporting related to Basel III under the applicable WAMU framework.
Two ways of checking
Examples of controls monitored continuously
Our approach
Map
Processes, risks and key controls are listed with your teams.
Configure
Each control is given a test rule, a frequency and an alert threshold.
Monitor
Data is extracted at regular intervals and tested in full, with the support of our in-house AI.
Resolve
Each exception is analysed, then explained or corrected by a named owner.
Report
A dashboard and a periodic report give management an up-to-date view of the system.
What you receive
- Internal audit plan and register of the controls monitored.
- Periodic dashboard and exception report.
- Remediation plan followed through to closure.