I am wondering how everyone is maintaining their workpapers. I am coming from a CPA firm where everything was paperless to a bank that is less than $400 million and everything is paper. In my prior life we kept all workpapers in binders or in file folders. What is everyone else using? It's been several years since I was auditing internally.

We try to keep everything electronic if possible, unsigned write-ups and spreadsheets are certainly kept electronically. We keep all of our signed-off formal write-ups and any applicable workpapers together in a box. Every year gets it's own box (or two).

Our audit department maintains all documentation electronically using MS Office programs and Adobe Acrobat. We had previously used binders and file folders, but our three auditors prefer maintaining them electronically. While the licensing is fairly affordable, the potential cost is disk space; we have substantial archives of workpapers and we occasionally hear from our IT Department.

Electronic in TeamMate with an occasional item stored in paper format in a binder.

All mine are paper - unfortunately. I am hoping to get it electronic before too long. I use green folders for each audit - listing the year and topic on the tab. This seems to be the most logical and easy to find way to manage the paper files.....

We are in the same boat - our supervisor is very old school and believes everything must be on paper. We are trying to drag him (kicking and screaming I might add) into the 21st century. Until then, we store the most recent audit workpapers on site, and older ones are filed in boxes (by year)and moved to our off site storage facility until time to destroy. Everything (reports, spreadsheets, etc.) is maintained electronically as well. (Belt and suspenders mentality...)

We have a scanner and I have requested to start scanning reports used in the audit instead of photocopying. Hopefully this will be approved because there is no cost.

Until then I just use the file folders and save them.

I wish I had a scanner - I don't know that anyone cares how I document my work as I am the entire internal audit department.

I am trying to move more toward an electronic workpaper environment but it is quite time consuming and I am struggling to get the work done at this point. Hopefully after I get through this year it will become easier...

I was getting into using a cheapo Paperport scanner to keep e-files. That was 5 years ago. But I still had a lot of paper. If you are interested in a scanner, the basic no frills one-sheet at a time can be had for $200. http://orders.visioneer.com/category.jsp?category=MOBILE

Thanks for all of your input! I'd like to go paperless, but am trying to figure out a way to do it that is cost-effective and efficient.

We purchased a ScanSnap scanner that PDF's anything we run through it. This little guy was not cheap, but was well worth it. It was very helpful especially since we just had our FDIC exam and had to send ALL of our workpapers and things using FDICConncet. The examiners were thrilled because we were able to upload all of our workpapers and were able to name each document according to their section and request number. This was our first exam that was paperless!!

That is good to know! We're due for an FDIC exam in the spring and I'd like to be able to send them everything paperless. I'm definitely going to look into it!

I am still working on getting management to get a ScanSnap for each department that saves their workpapers. I would like to see one in the New Accounts Department and one at Accounts Payable and even one in Personel.

Back to our exam... We just created a folder on the network under one of our users and saved the images in that folder. After getting all our stuff together we moved the folder to our desktop and connected to the FDICConnet and uploaded. It really was that easy.

When we were a paper shop (there is just one of me) - all paper was stored in cardstock binders. Each year was a new color.

Now -> we are using adobe and a Microtek scanner. Make sure you get a scanner with a self feeder and the option to scan on a flatbed (for those checks that won't fit through a feeder). It scans all papers into a PDF. I also can print reports from our core processor directly into PDFs too. Then when I have compiled all reports to complete my audit, I "print" everything to one main PDF.

Today for example, I printed my document titled ->
Flood Audit 2008 Completed 10-17-2008 and all 118 pages are in one PDF file that is 7MB.

A few tips if you want to develop your own in-house electronic workpapers.
- Use the Text Box tool in Adobe to help tic and tie

- Use the typewriter tool (our IT dept did a reg.edit to change the font to red for me)

- Talk to IT to make sure there is enough server space. I actually only keep 2 years of workpapers on the network and then the 3rd year back will be written on CDs and stored in the vault. At this point my 3rd year back (and 4th) are still paper - so those are taking up drawer space.

-Organize your folders on the network. I have a seperate folder for Completed Audit workpapers. Then each audit area has it's own folder. Flood Audit for example. Within the Flood Audit folder are my working documents and one more folder titled Completed. As I complete a subsection (Review of adequate insurance for example) I move those corresponding workpapers in the Completed folder. Once all workpapers are in the completed folder, I know I am done .

The origninal move to electronic took a year to complete. We started January 1 2006 and in 2006 as we progressed through the audit schedule each new audit transitioned to electronic.

One more thing - the bank also moved to paperless (don't let it fool you, we still go through tons of paper) - using a document imaging system I think through our core processor, so that make things so much easier.

But Audit did the move first. We were paperless a full year before the rest of the bank. And the cost of the scanner was cheaper than the cost of the binders for the almost 3 years we've been doing it.