If your credit union struggles to keep up with increasing audit demands, you're not alone. Unfortunately, credit union auditors rarely have the resources to fix every problem at once. It’s key to prioritize changes that have the potential to yield the biggest impact.

Fortunately, because so many auditors have experienced increased demands with limited resources, we've discovered an easy rubric with which to identify which improvements to prioritize.

Read ton to see how to find, prioritize, and address issues, improving your audit efficiency despite limited resources.

What's the Potential for Increasing Efficiency?

In our work with credit union auditors, we’ve discovered that one of the most significant issues affecting their teams and preventing growth is time management. There’s simply not enough time to accomplish all of the audit work teams face daily.

While you can’t magically create more time in which to accomplish auditing activities, you can majorly shift the focus on the type of work being done. Audit work typically falls into one of two categories:

1. Skills-based substantive work
2. Tedious administrative minutia

Audit teams often get caught up in administrative work and devote a majority of their time—around 60% of it on average—to tackling administrative tasks like:

• Maintaining spreadsheets,
• Collecting documents,
• Status follow-ups,
• Sending reminders, and
• Other related tasks.

These activities are necessary to keep the audit department (and the credit union as a whole) operating smoothly, but they don’t contribute to innovation and growth. Cutting back on the amount of time spent performing administrative tasks will allow auditors to focus on work that utilizes skill, expertise, and specialized training. This results in more meaningful work accomplished without stretching staff thin.

Reducing administrative task time offers immediate savings that can be reallocated to more relevant work like planning, strategizing, performing testing, analyzing data, validating findings, and other, more productive operations.

The question then becomes how credit unions can decrease the effort spent on clerical tasks.

How to Reduce Administrative Tasks

It’s impossible to reduce the number of tasks that must be done. Neglecting the administrative minutia to focus on substantive activities will only slow things down in the long run. Instead, credit union auditors can strategize for, streamline, or fully automate many of the time-consuming administrative tasks by implementing different kinds of tools.

Need help picking a tool? Consult the Audit Efficiency Matrix below, a tool developed by Redboard to help credit union auditors increase auditing efficiency with minimal disruption.

The Audit Efficiency Matrix can help you determine the fundamental differences between types of efficiency tools and which kind is right for your organization’s needs, as well as how to measure the success of the solutions once they’re implemented.