Why diagrams are essential for your company audits

We were promised flying cars

Back in the day, the year 2000 was heralded as our space-age future. We were promised routine space travel and flying cars. Instead, we experienced an explosion in IT and, as a consequence, how we did business.

But this new way of online working also brought several very high-profile and wide-ranging cases of corporate fraud.

Companies like Enron went bankrupt overnight due to institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud. Something had to be done, and it was, enter the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. A federal law that established comprehensive auditing and financial regulations for public companies.

An audit or a root canal

Given a choice between an audit or root canal treatment, many would opt for the dental visit, but times have changed. Auditing used to mean trawling through pages and pages of documentation and cross-referencing. Today’s processes and descriptions can be greatly simplified by using diagrams and images. A picture is worth a thousand words.”

draw.io to the rescue

draw.io is such a tool, procedures, processes, or anything be drawn and shown in a visual form.

And that includes help with auditing. No more having to read or write pages and pages of text explaining procedures, but instead, you can quickly create a drawing that explains everything. Processes and Architectures can be shown in a simple, clear, and concise manner using diagrams. This includes, but is not limited to, use-cases like UML to BPMN, network architectures, or classic flowcharts (and tables).

And draw.io offers enterprise-grade security and privacy standards.

You can write pages of content…or just draw one diagram that explains it all

And this is how it’s done

draw.io for Confluence automatically offers complete process documentation and revision history recording. Using draw.io in Confluence, processes and architectures are not only described but at the same time every change to your diagram results in a new version of your Confluence page. On the Confluence page history level, you can quickly see which changes were made and by whom.

And you can always roll back to an earlier version of the page if needed.

For a summary of page changes, go to More Options menu (…) > Page History

If you like to see what exactly has been changed between specific diagram versions, insert the draw.io editor and go to File > Revision history. Here you can see the changes visually, and of course, you can also roll back to previous versions. 

Enter the draw.io edit mode in Confluence to access specific details between diagram versions

Real power of draw.io in Confluence

From a simple internal audit or perhaps a Sarbanes-Oxley audit, the use of diagrams can simplify the task. For example, Processes and Architectures can be shown in a simple, clear, and concise manner using diagrams. And, draw.io’s simple yet elegant system of revision history will help you achieve ISO/IEC certifications which will make any auditor smile. Try draw.io for Confluence today!