This is important in understanding a company’s debt profile or ensuring stakeholders have a properly contextualized grasp of readily available assets and cash flow. This assertion confirms the liabilities, assets, and equity balances recorded in a financial statement actually exist. The auditor is required to collect whatever evidence is necessary to establish a connection between the values on the document and their real world counterparts. Confirming all recorded transactions and other information presented in financial statements meet accounting standards for completeness and accuracy. Balance SheetA balance sheet is one of the financial statements of a company that presents the shareholders’ equity, liabilities, and assets of the company at a specific point in time. It is based on the accounting equation that states that the sum of the total liabilities and the owner’s capital equals the total assets of the company.

• Stakeholders will get the clear understanding they need, and your team will have useful and accurate data they can rely on for effective financial planning and decision making.
• One of the ways to test this assertion is to redo all the calculations.
• In other words, if your small business is being audited, the auditor may ask for proof that the cash balance of your bank account belongs to the business.

Also referred to as management assertions, these claims can be either implicit or explicit. Completeness is a crucial audit assertion since it relates to the balance sheet and income statement. For example, they must ensure companies have recognized all items in fixed assets that they must have. For that, auditors may use various tests and audit procedures to ascertain the completeness audit assertions of those assets. Suppose the auditor assesses risk at the transaction level, assessing all accounts payable assertions at high. It means the auditor should perform substantive procedures to respond to the high-risk assessments for each assertion. The risk assessment for valuation, existence, rights and obligations, completeness, and all other assertions are high.

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You may be wondering if financial statement level risk can affect assertion level assessments. Fictitious vendors is at the upper end of the inherent risk spectrum, then a significant risk is present in relation to the occurrence assertion. In this example, the auditor responds by adding a substantive test for detection of fictitious vendors. Occurrence and cutoff have not been a problem areas in past years.

Existence Assertion – Assets, liabilities, and equity balances exist at the period end. Classification Assertion – Transactions have been classified and presented fairly in the financial statements.

Valuation

There should be proof of the existence of physical assets or liability. Additionally, notice the inherent risk for occurrence is assessed at high. A significant risk is, by definition, a high inherent risk, never low or moderate.

These assertions help the auditor to reduce the risk of material misstatement in the financial statements. In summation, assertions are claims made by members of management regarding certain aspects of a business. Independent auditors use these representations as the foundation from which they design and perform procedures to test management’s assertions and form an opinion. A lot of work is required for your organization to support the assertions that your management team makes. And lastly, if you are a service organization you should be cognizant of the need to maintain a strong control environment to support your clients.

Audit Assertions Balance Sheet

We test this audit assertion for both income statement transactions and balance sheet items.Accuracy, or valuation and allocationAccuracyValuation and allocationAmount related to transactions and events have been recorded appropriately. Special purpose entities are sometimes created to be parties to off-financial-statement items.

An audit is the examination and evaluation of the financial statements of a company performed by an objective third party. The purpose of an audit is to make sure that the information contained in financial statements is fair and accurate and that a business is in compliance with all necessary rules. Publicly held companies are required to have an audit of their financial statements annually. Checking account balances have been properly reconciled.Presentation and disclosure– All items included in cash are unrestricted, and the cash is available for operations. Substantive testing for the assertion of existence frequently involves some type of confirmation with an outside third party.