Audits for your business can be driven externally by the IRS or internally for business accounting reasons. Microsoft Excel can be used for setting up audits, and Microsoft has provided several templates to help you prepare an audit within the program. While they were written for Excel 2003, they work just fine in Excel 2010 and Excel 2013. Filling out these templates will make your interactions with an independent auditing agent go more smoothly.

Download the audit report template from Microsoft (link in Resources).

Open the template in Microsoft Excel by double clicking on the file. For Excel 2007 and later, the file will open in "compatibility mode." Enter your business information into the cells indicated. For example, enter your business name in the field marked "Business Name" and enter your address.

Get the standards compliance documentation needed from your auditing service. This will vary depending on the accounting form and the reason for the audit. This documentation may specify the order and labeling of spreadsheet columns.

Gather the strategic and financial information you need to fill out the template; the exact particulars will Include bank records for your business, including dates of transactions, as well as your list of accounts payable, the checks sent out to them, and their amounts.

Insert columns into the spreadsheet by right-clicking a column to the left of where the new one would go and selecting "Insert."

Enter the labels in each column matching the instructions in your compliance documentation. For example, if you needed to add a column for "Checks Paid" as column J, you'd enter the label "Checks Paid" in the cell where the other labels in the template are.

Repeat steps 5 and 6 until you have the right number of columns with the right labels.

Enter the financial information into the rows of the spreadsheet, matching data to the appropriate columns.

Save the spreadsheet and proofread it. Make corrections as needed.