How Effective Are Mobile Audits to a Business?

Mobile phones have made our lives so easier from making calls or answering them for our personal and professional use.

A whopping 62% of the global population uses mobile phones i.e. over 3.5 billion people. The mobile phone has become an essential part of our daily routine so much so we cannot imagine our lives without this device.

But this handy device serves more than purely our routine work (alarm, calendar, social apps, etc.). It is now becoming indispensable in handling our business affairs too.

Asset Management through a Mobile Application

Asset Management is a systematic way to operate, maintain, upgrade and dispose of assets in a most cost-effective manner, while monitoring cost, risk and performance parameters.

This can now be used through a mobile phone and the mobile-enabled Asset Management Software provides you with 24*7 access and convenience to look at all business assets.

If you have to find out the location of an asset, you do not need to get to the desktop. You can simply access the application on the mobile and get the necessary information.

Here are the important areas where a mobile application is greatly useful:

• Pushing Notifications
• Increase in Productivity
• Integrations with Existing Software
• Ease and Convenience of Use
• Real-time access to business Assets
• Scanning Capabilities
• Secured App Data
• Data Accuracy
• Effective Asset Tracking and Management
• Access on every Platform

More than these aspects, there are several other features to help track and manage business assets like adding or discarding assets, movement history of assets, audits and physical verification.

Also Read: Innovative Utilization of Several Asset Tracking Techniques

What are Audits?

As per Wikipedia, an audit is an independent examination of financial information of an entity or asset, whether it generates any profit or not and irrespective of its size or form.

The process helps to ensure that books of accounts of an enterprise are properly maintained as required by law. Through audits, stakeholders can also effectively evaluate and improve the effectiveness of risk management, control, and governance processes over the subjects under examination.

Audits are essential in order to achieve, among other things, the objectives of a business organization and report on its operations, prevent fraudulent use or misappropriation of its assets and maintain the minimum cost of assets.

Importance of Audits

1. Business Objectives

An effective audit system enables to pursue and attain the organization's strategic objectives. The enterprise requires internal control over processes and operations in order to ensure the detection and prevention of irregularities, maintain mandatory business records, monitor ongoing performance and promote operational profitability.

2. Risk of Mis-Statement

From the perspective of allocation of organizational resources and information on the profitability of the different segments and product lines of a business, an internal control i.e. an asset audit software is necessary.

In addition, such a system furnishes all relevant information about the status of an organization's assets and liabilities.

3. Detection and Prevention of Frauds

Internal audits play an important role in an organization's activity to prevent fraud. Regular analysis of operations and maintenance of systems go a long way in preventing various kinds of frauds and accounting irregularities.

4. Cost of Capital

The cost of capital is a very important factor for an organization, irrespective of its size. This actually covers the risk associated with investment to a large extent, where a higher return on investment could entail a high risk.

An effective audit system helps in mitigating risks like information risk, fraud, stealing, or suboptimal management (due to insufficient information).

Also Read: Asset Management System: A Crucial Management Tool for Any Business

Why does a Business need Mobile Audits?

Mobile audits are transforming the way to conduct audits and inspections in various industries. There is a huge organizational demand to automate audits so as to increase efficiency and reduce risks.

Mobile phones are very easy to use and they make audits and inspections convenient exercises to operate from anywhere and at any time.

Scanning devices of asset tags is possible using a mobile phone camera. Thus audits can be remotely enabled on any smartphone.

You can create and assign audits based on different categories and location of assets. The mobile app helps in keeping asset count and detect theft or damage.

Through mobile audits, the enterprise is able to receive all data in real-time. This enables in ensuring data integrity and accuracy.

Benefits of Mobile Audits

1. Better Data Collection

Mobile phones help in the use of different essential tools and collect better and accurate data like geo-location, e-signature, etc. Through these enabling features, audits can be conducted easily and potential errors can be prevented and corrected too.

GPS helps get the exact coordinates of business assets; with this, audio recordings can be added or voice messages recorded along with text, thereby reducing much paperwork.

2. Check on Data Integrity

Data integrity is the most beneficial feature of mobile audits. Data gets updated instantly and there is a certainty of delivery of correct information in real-time.

Offline data capturing also increases data integrity as information captured from the location of business assets. On the flip side, threats of data loss are likely if the auditor enters incorrect information.

3. Increased Productivity

Digital things make work easy on a daily basis. Huge paperwork and hard copies can be frustrating for auditors to process all information manually as it is time-consuming and not very efficient.

Mobile audits will increase your team productivity and help you get accurate data and information in real-time.

Read Also: Asset Maintenance: Types with Benefits and Drawbacks [Infographic]

Conclusion

The adoption of mobile technology makes the business grow with more opportunities. Using a mobile phone not only enables view and access but also editing of information.

The mobile audit provides data and information which is accurate and on a real-time basis. This greatly helps in identifying challenges and find their appropriate solutions.

Asset Infinity provides the feature of mobile audits as a top digital solution to meet the business requirements.

In this tech-savvy world, mobile audits are becoming more and more acceptable to deliver achieved goals.