Creating Findings and Action Plans

A finding identified during execution will have the following status: Draft. Auditors can submit a finding to an auditee assigned to the finding as an executive responsible person and/or an audit manager, audit lead of an audit depending on configuration. After submission, the finding will obtain the following status: Submitted. Approvers approve the finding, then the finding and its action plans gets the status, Open, and can be processed on the follow-up phase.

All draft findings will be automatically converted to the status, Open, when the final audit report is approved and the audit phase moves to the follow-up phase. If a finding has been already submitted, then it should be approved by designated approvers to allow performing a final report approval workflow.

In the follow-up phase the finding should be resolved and set to the following status: Closed. If the finding becomes irrelevant during the follow-up phase, it can be set to the following status: Obsolete. It is possible to reopen the closed finding if changes are necessary and work on the finding should be continued.

After finalizing the execution phase, the audit reporting phase should be started. On the reporting phase an audit lead generates from the system or uploads a draft audit report and submits it to an audit manager. The audit manager approves the draft audit report. If the audit manager rejects the audit report, the audit lead reworks the audit report and submits it again. After the draft report is approved, the audit lead starts to work on a final audit report, then submits it to the audit manager to obtain approval, the audit manager approves the final report and issues it to the audit team.

SAP Audit Management offers the possibility to create, submit and accept a finding not only on the execution phase, but also after a draft report of an audit has already been approved. You can open an audit with the status, Draft Report Approved, in the My Ongoing Audits app and start a workflow for an existing draft finding by submitting it, or create a new finding and submit it.