6 December 2024
Our first national conference was a great success. Below are some of the highlights.
The panel discussion with Justin Reid, Cameron Town, Bill Heritage, and Paul Selwyn-Smith from CAANZ practice review on the topic “How can we do better?” covered some excellent points – not without some controversy – and humour.
Laura Addinall impressed and inspired with her talks on Running an Efficient Micro-practice and Incorporating Systems Testing into Audits. Well worth a second listen.
Reuben Rusk’s well researched talks on workplace culture were highly relevant and well received.
Cameron Town brought some great insights from his experience as partner at Silks Audit about how they have scaled their audit practice to a multi-office firm, plus discussing the practical aspects of materiality – which generated lots of discussion.
Bruce Mcniven from the XRB delivered an entertaining commentary on the proposed Less Complex Entities standard – generating a lot of discussion.
Bruce was joined by Misha Pieters from the XRB who, as well as covering the work of the XRB, talked about the upcoming standard for service performance on review engagements and the new fraud and going concern standard updates.
We managed to entice auditing legend Bill Heritage out of retirement to share his wit and wisdom on “Basics of risk assessment and response” and “Mistakes you would never make.”
Justin Reid entertained us for two sessions (plus interjecting into some of the others) about “Quality management tips for smaller practices” and “Fraud – understanding your role and practical aspects and indicators for identifying it.”
Paul Selwyn-Smith from Practice Review bought some great perspectives on the topic “Suggestions for better small audit quality” and candidly addressed some hard questions from the audience here and in the panel discussion.
Dawn Alexander also talked about “Common issues in audit files” and “Empowering your audit team and seeing them grow as professionals” from her perspective of having lead the PKF NZ quality control committee and having lead training for PKF across NZ and Australia, dovetailing her practical experience into Reuben’s research findings.
The AA team also presented on vision, history, new features, new content, issues we’ve observed with adoption of NZ AS1 (revised) and the new Tier 3 standard, plus an extensive Q & A panel.
Feedback
From the respondents so far:
How relevant and helpful do you think it was for your job?
92% gave a 4 or 5 out of 5.
How satisfied were you with the conference session content?
97% gave a 4 or 5 out of 5.
What were your key take aways from this conference?
“That we are not alone, there are connectable people in the same situation. Meeting in person was extremely beneficial.”
“We’re not doing a terrible job; there’s a lot of new standards etc to get up to speed with; & some great suggestions for more efficient and better quality audits; looking forward to trying the new version of AA.”
“The need to keep up to date. What a great network of knowledgeable and helpful people we have in the Audit Assistant fraternity and audit community in general.”
“Learning from experienced practitioners and information relevant to to Not For Profit space.”
Any additional comments regarding the sessions or overall agenda?
“Extremely relevant, all speakers were excellent. Entire two days were well targeted with all speakers relevant.”
“Extremely helpful conference with great content.”
Additional feedback on logistics
“This was the best conference I have attended. The venue was the weak point. It needed to be bigger, include tables to make writing notes, having a cup of tea easier.”
The good news is that if you missed out on the conference you can still attend as we have made high quality recordings of all the sessions. These are accessible from our training platform. Those who attended can watch again for free, and those who weren’t able to make it or didn’t know about it can subscribe and watch just like they were there.
We will be running another conference next year – probably in Christchurch, so make sure you keep your eye out for this.