An annual audit does exactly what it says: once a year, a sample of transactions is examined, and an opinion is formed on the statements as a whole. It is essential, and it is not designed to catch what happens in the other eleven months. Nothing in it is meant to notice a supplier registered twice under two codes, paid twice for eight months.
What continuous review finds
- Duplicate and near-duplicate payments: same bank account, same tax id, two vendor codes.
- Approvals outside the matrix: the same person requesting and approving, or an approver acting above their limit.
- Cut-off errors that move revenue or cost between periods and flatter one month at the expense of the next.
- Inventory valuation drift when a costing method is not updated after a supplier contract changes.
- Manual journal entries posted late on the last day of the month, in round amounts, with thin descriptions.
None of these are exotic. All of them were visible in the ledger long before year-end. Our published client stories describe two of them: transactions missed by manual review and surfaced within six weeks, and a valuation gap caught three weeks before close. No amounts, by policy; the pattern is the point.
Coverage, not sampling
With the whole population scored by risk, the question changes from “which five percent do we look at” to “which findings matter this week”. The Auditor agent in MFT Intelligence ranks every flagged item by financial impact against your ISA 320 threshold and cites the exact records. A licensed auditor reviews the ranked list and signs the report. That is the division of labour: the machine covers, the accountant judges.
Your external auditor is not the competition
Continuous review makes the annual audit shorter and cheaper. Findings are classified against ISA, the evidence trail is already there, and the working papers are retained for seven years by default. Most external auditors we work with ask for the run log on day one.