For finance teams
The reconciliation was done in March, the explanation was in an email, the person who wrote it has left, and the schedule that supported it was a workbook somebody has since rebuilt. None of that is an accounting problem. It is a record-keeping problem, and it is the one that turns a two-week audit into a six-week one.
Six problems
None of these is caused by the accounting being wrong. They are caused by the working around it living in workbooks, inboxes and the heads of people who move on.
A reconciliation performed monthly is a control; the same one performed in March is an archaeology exercise. Carry-forward on the row fingerprint is what makes monthly worth doing: an item outstanding at the end of one period appears in the next pointing at its predecessor and keeping its original period, so closing this month does not mean re-deriving last month.
Because the workbook is rebuilt each period and everything looks new. Here an item keeps the period it was first raised in, so an ageing means what it says — and a stale item is visible as stale months before somebody has to explain it to an auditor.
It is a required field here, in the schema. Clearing an item without a narration is not possible, so the reason is on the record next to the amount rather than in somebody’s inbox. That is a control for you before it is evidence for the auditor.
The purchase register is reconciled against the portal statement invoice by invoice, with missing, excess and tax mismatches reported separately rather than netted into one difference, and ineligible credit disallowed with the provision cited on the line. The figures the reconciliation produces are the figures, computed once in exact decimals — there is no second spreadsheet to reconcile the reconciliation against.
Every figure in a deliverable traces to a computation line, its working paper and the ledger row it was imported from, and that trail is stored rather than reconstructed. The answer to "where did this come from" is a click, and the same trail is what your auditor uses rather than a fresh set of questions.
That is the habit worth breaking, and it usually starts with software that never quite ties. Exact decimals mean a reconciliation that should be zero is zero, so a difference of a few paise is a real difference rather than an arithmetic artefact — and the cross-foot runs on every table before anything is produced from it.
Arriving at the audit
Almost everything an auditor asks for in the first fortnight is something the finance team already knew in the ordinary course and did not keep in a form anybody else could read.
Said plainly
Your books stay where they are. This holds the working papers around them — the reconciliations, the computations, the statutory schedules and the trail between them — and it is deliberately not a ledger you post to. It also does not form an opinion on anything: an opinion is a professional act performed by somebody outside your organisation, and no amount of good record-keeping is a substitute for it. What it does is make the audit shorter and the questions cheaper to answer, which is worth having on its own and is the only claim we will make for it.
The first fortnight of questions is the most useful thing you can describe, because almost all of it is something your team already knew and did not keep in a form anybody else could read.
Get in touch
No chatbot and no ticket queue. Tell us what your practice actually looks like — how many members sign, how many prepare, which of audit, tax and compliance you do most of — and someone who works on the software will reply.
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