Beyond taking care of yourself physically and mentally, making sure your technical skills are refreshed will naturally make your workload easier to handle. The audit lifecycle should feel like second nature to you. That way you spend less time second-guessing and more time executing. Review notes decrease. Rework diminishes. Most importantly, your increased productivity during the workday is going to earn you back some of your personal time. That sense of control over your work and processes will make even the longest days more manageable.

To refresh your technical skills, we recommend the Auditing Top-Ten List series, developed by Sunish Mehta, CPA, CGMA. This series is designed to walk you through the entire audit life cycle and apply that guidance immediately to your engagements.

Planning and Materiality

Planning and materiality decisions shape a risk-based audit—from selecting benchmarks and thresholds to aggregating misstatements and documenting judgments. This planning and materiality in auditing course clarifies how to select benchmarks, set thresholds, and avoid both over-auditing and under-auditing.

Risk Assessment Procedures

Before you can respond to risks, you need to understand the entity, its environment, and its controls. This risk assessment procedures course will update your understanding of the entity, evaluate internal control design and implementation, and perform preliminary analytics that go beyond a basic two-column flux—so your risk assessment reflects what’s really happening this year, not last year.

Financial Statement Assertions and Risks

Every procedure exists to test specific assertions and understanding what can go wrong focuses on your testing. The financial statement assertions and risks in auditing CPE course shows how overall risk, assertion-level risk, and fraud risk drive the design of your procedures. You’ll be able to identify what can go wrong, sharpen your risk assessments, and tightly link those risks to the procedures you perform.

The Audit Risk Model

The audit risk model drives how much work you need to do and where to focus it. Learn how SAS 145 reshapes inherent risk assessment and why understanding this relationship helps you manage detection risk instead of defaulting to line-item auditing with this audit risk model course.

Internal Control

Your understanding of controls determines whether you can rely on them to reduce substantive testing. Sunish’s internal controls in audit course covers the documentation and evaluation of internal controls in nonpublic entity audits. Connect entity-level and activity-level controls directly to your risk assessment, control reliance decisions, and deficiency evaluation—so your internal control work is better targeted, better documented, and easier to defend.

Tests of Controls

Effective control testing can significantly reduce your substantive workload—if you know when reliance makes sense. The tests of controls course clarifies where tests of controls fit in the audit pipeline and how they interact with the audit risk model. You’ll learn when relying on controls pays off and when a substantive-only strategy is the better call.

Analytics

Well-designed analytical procedures can identify risks, corroborate expectations, and sometimes replace tests of details entirely. This analytics in audit course will show you how to design preliminary and final analytical procedures that surface risk, so your analytic work stands up to peer review.

Tests of Details

Tests of details provide the direct evidence needed for high-risk areas where analytics alone aren’t sufficient. This test of details in audit course walks through when and why to test details, achieving coverage without unnecessary sampling.

Nonstatistical Sampling

Nonstatistical sampling is the workhorse method on most private-company audits—but it’s also one of the easiest areas to over- or under-do. Sunish’s nonstatistical sampling in audit course ties directly to AU-C 350 and the audit risk model, showing you how to design, execute, and evaluate samples that are both efficient and defensible.

Audit Wrap-Up

Audit wrap-up is where audit quality is either confirmed or compromised. Refresh your knowledge on this critical final phase, covering final documentation review, subsequent events, going concern assessments, and more, so your audit wrap-up stands up to peer review with this course.

Documentation

Effective documentation is the backbone of a defensible audit—if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. Explore the full lifecycle of audit documentation: what must be documented, when, and how timeliness and re-performability drive audit quality and review efficiency.

Disaggregation: A Cutting-Edge Audit Tool

Breaking populations into meaningful components allows for more precise risk assessment and targeted testing. Learn how to use disaggregation to sharpen judgment and reduce unnecessary work with this auditing CPE course.