It is vital, if you own a business in a regulated industry, that you have audit trail software in place. This is because, without it, it will be almost impossible to meet the regulatory challenges of properly maintaining all your documents. It is likely that you will receive thousands of emails and documents each and every day, and each of those has to be discoverable and untampered with. The days of filing cabinets are well and truly behind us!

Why You Need Audit Trail Software

There continue to be quite a lot of businesses who think they can do everything “the old way”. That is, however, until they face an audit and find their score drops tremendously. Not just that, an audit means all employees have to come together to find all the necessary documentation and proof, resulting in significant downtime. Worst of all, an audit can happen at any time, with organizations such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration conducting random audits and inspections of organizations they regulate.

If, however, you have audit trail software in place, the entire process only needs to take a few minutes. You can simply enter details of what the auditor is looking for, and the system will instantly produce all the relevant results.

Change Management

Audit trail software is not just beneficial for audits, however. It also helps your organization as a whole to embrace change management. Whenever some scores poorly on an audit, one of the key things that is brought to light is that the organization and its change management strategies are not in harmony. In fact, it demonstrates that there are entire processes within an organization that should change. When these processes do change, and the audit score is eventually raised, innovation often happens and the business starts to work better together as a whole. As such, by installing this type of software, you actually preempt that, instantly working on a better, more efficient, more innovative company.

Once you have installed your software, your organization will always be compliant with all the relevant legislations, rules, and best practice recommendations. These will therefore have to be implemented across all your departments, as well as in how you work together with external suppliers. You can even customize the system, so that it meets your personal needs perfectly.

Other Benefits

There are many other benefits to having audit trail software in place. For instance, it ensures you can meet any e-discovery requests, particularly if you face some sort of litigation. It instantly proves that documents have not been tampered with, when they were received and by whom, and what happened to them next. Furthermore, these systems can help you make your working processes more efficient by filtering spam messages automatically. The added benefit of this is that it leaves your company better protected against external hacker attacks.

As you can see, this type of software really is vital to the survival of an organization, ensuring it is at all times compliant with relevant legislation.