A Case Study of Business Process Modelling, Continuous Auditing and Reporting in Gwanda District

Emerging economies are gradually drifting towards reliance on small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for their growth and competitiveness. In their bid to attain excellence, they need to adopt sound financial information processing systems in a rapidly changing business financial reporting environment. The sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed SMEs to a new form of pure risk in their business processes and financial reporting systems. The survival of these SMEs depended on their ability to develop and implement risk management models most suitable for the pandemic’s cyclical nature and the irregularities it caused to the traditional time series of business process operations. This chapter presents a case study of the business process modelling, continuous auditing and reporting approaches adopted by SMEs during the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter explores the challenges posed to SMEs by the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, it considers the business process models adopted for auditing and financial reporting from the perspective of their contribution to averting threats to the survival and effective growth of SMEs in volatile and pandemic-based business environments. This chapter briefly explains continuous auditing (CA) and financial reporting, as well as assessing the extent and effectiveness of its use among SMEs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of new technologies and business processes. By modelling business processes in the presence of continuous auditing and financial reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter provides businesses, policymakers and future researchers with a contingent time series analysis model to predict the behaviour of financial reporting and information management systems in the case of future pandemics.