Using Slack in the internal audit department

I love the idea of Slack. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s collaboration software for teams that replaces a lot of what we’re currently using email to do. It’s main features as far as I can tell are persistent chat rooms (channels), direct messaging, and file sharing with cloud integration.

It would be so great if audit software did something like this, along with the audit specific features we need like work paper approval and sign-off, issue tracking, and report generation. All the audit software I’ve seen and used is just so clunky and poorly designed. I guess it’s too much of a niche market to get really well designed software that is polished and complete.

With Slack, you could set up a specific channel for each audit, or even sections within an audit (e.g. procurement), or phases of the audit (e.g. planning). Invite only those team members that are involved in that area of the audit to the channel, and add people later as needed. They’ll be able to read back and catch up on what’s happened before they joined.

So much of email is sending files back and forth, which would be eliminated with Slack. You wouldn’t even need to let someone know via email that a file’s been updated and is ready for review by the team or manager, since that communication would be within Slack too.

Are there any internal audit teams out there using Slack to reduce email volume and work collaboratively?

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash