Tally

you are right even i agree. whenever we go on audit we tend to verify and vouch the financial informations provided and not at all concerned wth doing accounting for the client however we can use telly to extract the relevant info but gererally by taking hardcopies of requred info we some how solve our purpose so it is good to have the knowledge of tally to effectively use it as an audit tool

Each audit is different but generally speaking on larger clients who have accounting on tally its better in my opinion to extract information into excel. Auditing procedures like trend/ratio analysis, data manipulation and sampling are a piece of cake with excel. SoftCAAT is very useful but I have used it only once so can't comment in great detail.

Tally is a great accounting package. I have been using the same since its earlier version 4.5 till 9.0, the latest. The comparision too, sorting and search etc. provided by tally are great. Also the grouping for earlier years and current year can also be checked.