Pre-audit planning

Why the card is on the map before the workbench exists

The audit map follows the ISACA Planning phase, and pre-audit planning is one of its steps, reached after scope and before the procedures are determined. Leaving it off the map would tell the auditor that the product skips a step the profession does not. Showing a card that claims planning happened, or that carries an invented completeness figure, would be worse. So the card is visible from the first day of the audit, muted, and not reachable, with a reason that says plainly that the workbench is not available yet. A dedicated read backs it, returning the reserved state and the signals the workbench will later consume: whether the audit has evidence, and the prior audits for the same auditee. It returns no completeness score and no risk figure.

What the workbench will do

Pre-audit planning is the homework before fieldwork: studying prior audits, understanding how the area under review works, where risk concentrates, who to talk to, and what evidence to request. The workbench will put that work inside the audit, reading the prior audits Run Audit already holds for the same auditee and the evidence already linked, and ending in a list of interviewees and evidence requests the fieldwork phase can act on. The full risk assessment, with inherent, control, and detection risk and the firm’s risk appetite and tolerance, is a later expansion of this same step rather than a new feature. In this release fieldwork and the audit programme do not wait on it. Which prior-audit signals the workbench consumes first is an open question in the PRD.