The things needing corrective action can be identified soon after they have occurred and they can be reported in a standard format. In this kind of arrangement corrective action can be taken without any delay. This results in cost savings and enhanced quality of services. The programming capabilities of a software are vital in the latter mentioned task.
IDEA offers very much for the auditing systems builder.
Thus, it is possible to combine the data processing capabilities of IDEA and Excel and Visual Basic. One can discuss, however, whether it is an internal auditors' job to set up these systems and to what degree. Visual Basic provides other useful tools to IDEA, too - like possibility to use functions and subroutines. It is unlikely that any audit software is able to provide better programming capabilities than a genuine programming language. Visual Basic programming skills can be used widely, e.g. in developing electronic questionnaires and expert systems.