Audit Checklist

⚠️ **Finance warning / Avertissement finance** : informational only, not investment advice. An audit checklist organizes the work, it does not replace the audit: a simulated confirmation or a skipped cycle can leave a material gap undetected, there is a real risk of loss in any reliance placed on records that were never truly tested, and no output here is a promise of return. Curated by Skill Harbor: the audit checklist skill of GAJETOso/financeskills. Use it to perform an internal audit, review controls, or prepare for an external financial audit, for both operational and financial audits. The initial assessment fixes the scope (a full financial audit or a specific cycle such as procure to pay or order to cash), the audit period, the key risk areas identified by management, the state of the control environment (existing control documents such as a risk control matrix, and who the process owners are). The framework orders the work by assertion, in priority order: existence and occurrence (did the transactions actually happen), completeness (is everything recorded), rights and obligations (does the company actually own the assets), valuation and allocation (are the amounts correct), and presentation and disclosure (is the reporting clear and compliant). The technical steps then work the cycles: revenue and receivables with cut-off testing on transactions near period-end and a review of high-value receivable balances with no subsequent collection; procurement and payables with the three-way match of purchase order, receiving report and vendor invoice, plus a search for unrecorded liabilities in payments made after year-end for services provided before it; fixed assets and inventory with a reconciliation of the asset register to physical counts and a recalculation of depreciation against policy. The deliverable is an audit findings report: an executive summary with the overall audit opinion and a summary of quantified findings, then the findings detail, each with the issue (the specific control gap or error), the risk (financial, regulatory or reputational impact), the recommendation as a step-by-step fix, and the suggested owner department. The skill anchors itself on the COSO internal control framework and the International Standards on Auditing, and points onward honestly: signs of fraud route to forensic accounting, macro variances to financial analysis, tax compliance to tax planning. From the GAJETOso/financeskills repository (MIT). Honest caveats: simulated procedures inside a chat are preparation, not evidence, so have the audit plan and any findings report checked by a qualified professional before any official use, and expect the external reviewers of the financial statements to run their own procedures regardless of what this checklist produced; the records, registers and control documents are yours to supply complete. Skill Harbor never reviews the code, review it yourself before use.