Auditing

Dee1

:001_unsure. Could anyone give me advice, I just can not pass the audit simulation. I am thinkg of doing BTC instead, which means I have to go back to class.

coojee

Hi there,

Auditing is a diificult paper to pass particularly if you don't work in auditing. I asssess auditing papers and have to do a lot of additional assessment with students. What books are you using as I feel that the osborne books don't really prepare you very well for the assessment.

What do others think about these books?

peugeot

Auditing is one of those subjects that is very technical but conversely very boring. The difference between audit in theory i.e. in AAT exams/simulations and that in practice is very minimal. A typical scenario in, say, an AAT simulation could well be the case in real life.

The key to getting to grips with the paper is to understand the techniques used for audit testing i.e. when to use substantive testing and when to use internal controls. The other key aspect of audit is to understand the financial statement assertions:

Completeness;
Occurrence;
Disclosure;
Existence;
Valuation;
Right and obligations.

Each area of the audit will focus on some of the above assertions e.g. stock is tested for existence, valuation and completness.

The two types of testing auditors use are tests of control (testing an entity's internal control environment) and substantive testing (testing a sample of transactions from the start of the transaction to the transactions ultimate arrival in the financial statements). The stronger the control environment, the less substantive testing the auditor has to do.

Auditing today is essentially a "balance sheet approach". Therefore any sort of debtors are primarily tested for overstatement, whilst creditors are tested for understatement.

The above points are mainly a summary of the more technical aspects of audit. There are articles that I have written which may help you and can be found at:

http://www.accountingtechnician.co.uk/atonline/archive/display/store690/item42358/

http://www.accountingtechnician.co.uk/atonline/archive/display/store690/item47408/

Good luck with your studies.

Steve

peugeot

There is now a further article I have had published about audit reports which may help you. It discusses which reports are applicable in certain circumstances and contain examples to illustrate them.

http://www.accountancystudents.co.uk/cms/professional_bodies/aat_read/reporting_on_audit_clients/

Kind regards
Steve

warwick5763

Auditing

Hi Dee,

I was confused as well. the main thing I found was to go through each section in the osborne book, like fixed assets, and simply write down the audit objective, the control objective and one substantive test for each control objective. Although initially confusing its actually straight forward and not as difficult as it looks. Just learn them by rote and the simulation will be fine. I dont work in finance at all and I have found if I learn things by rote understanding comes later, saying that I am still confused about variances. I used the Kaplan in college and the Osborne privately and I found the latter better as it was more concise and less wordy. Best of British.