To facilitate faster closing, the Trust made available its draft accounts and most of its working papers in advance of the Department of Health deadline in electronic and hard copy formats.
The electronic working papers were placed in a shared folder on the Trust's server and access given to the audit team. Electronic working papers were hyperlinked to summary schedules showing the download from primary feeder systems. These summaries had links to the general ledger to enable detailed interrogation of individual accounts and balances.
The Trust worked with the audit team to establish a query management system which included a template for all queries. This enabled the Trust and the audit team to monitor who was raising queries and at each stage of the audit, those responsible for dealing with the query and how promptly it was dealt with.