Audit season is considered one of the most stressful periods of a finance team’s year. The weeks leading up to it are often filled with late nights, hectic email chains, and a growing pile of documents that should have been organized months ago.
For many companies, it feels like preparing for an exam that you knew was coming but was never fully prepared for.
The fact is that most of this stress is avoidable. It doesn’t come from the audit itself. It comes from the underlying systems and processes that were never truly set up with audit readiness in mind.
The real cause of exam stress
When investigators arrive, they need a clear trail of evidence. You want to see how financial decisions were made, who approved what, whether purchases were properly approved, and whether the numbers in the accounts match the receipts. That’s the job. And when everything is well organized and accessible, audits can be carried out faster and more cost-effectively.
The problem is that in many small and medium-sized businesses, this evidence is scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets, shared drives, and sometimes the memory of the person who processed the transaction. Approval records can exist as a forwarded email from six months ago. Orders could have been agreed verbally. Expense reports may have been signed on paper and then placed in a drawer that no one has opened since.
Research from Ardent Partners found that without automated processes, companies need an average of 17.4 days to process a single invoice from receipt to payment. When you multiply this type of delay across hundreds of transactions, you realize how the documentation trail can become fragmented long before audit season even begins.
Your tech stack either helps or creates additional work
Most companies have accounting software. This is a given. But the accounting system itself only tells part of the story. It records transactions after they have occurred. What isn’t always captured is the decision-making process that led to these transactions – who requested the spending, who reviewed it, who gave the go-ahead, and whether it was within budget.
This is where the broader tech stack matters. The tools around your accounting system that process approvals, manage orders, route invoices for review, and capture supporting documentation will determine whether your audit preparation takes days or weeks.
When these tools work well together, the audit trail builds as part of daily operations. Every invoice that is approved, every order that is signed, every expense that is reviewed leaves a clear, searchable record. When exam time comes, don’t reconstruct the story from fragments. You simply share what is already there.
What auditors actually want to see
It helps to look at this from the examiner’s perspective. They’re not trying to get you. They seek to verify that your financial records are accurate, complete and supported by appropriate controls. The easier you make it for them, the faster the audit will go, the fewer follow-up questions will be asked, and the lower the overall cost.
There are a few things that always make auditors’ lives easier:
- A clear record of who approved each financial transaction and when
- Evidence that orders were placed before invoices were paid, not after
- Documentation showing that expenditures remained within approved budgets
- An accessible path with comments, notes and supporting documents attached to each transaction
None of this is revolutionary. But creating this data reliably and consistently is a problem for most companies, especially if the process for collecting it is manual or informal.
Integrate audit preparedness into daily operations
The most audit-ready companies aren’t the ones that struggle to prepare in the weeks before auditors arrive. They are the ones where preparation occurs automatically as part of daily business operations.
This is the change that makes the biggest difference. Instead of treating exam preparation as an annual project, it becomes a byproduct of good financial processes. If your accounts payable automation captures every step from invoice receipt to approval to payment, and if your approval workflows log every decision with timestamps, comments, and the identity of each approver, you’re continually creating your audit file without anyone having to think about it.
The UK accounting and auditing industry is estimated to be worth £8.8 billion in 2024 and audit fees have been steadily increasing. For SMEs where every pound spent on professional services counts, reducing the time your auditors have to spend requesting and verifying information can have a direct and meaningful impact on the final bill. Auditors usually calculate based on time. So anything that reduces the hours they spend tracking documentation means you get money back.
The control gap that upsets companies
Beyond documentation, auditors also look at internal controls. You want to know if your company has proper controls in place to prevent errors and fraud. This is where companies that rely on informal processes often get into difficulties.
If a single person can place an order, approve the invoice, and process payment without supervision, this is a control weakness. If there is no systematic way to verify that an invoice matches the original order, that’s another matter. These gaps don’t just lead to audit findings – they pose real financial risk to the company.
By building strong financial controls into your tech stack, these controls are carried out automatically. Orders are routed to the correct approver based on value and department. Invoices are matched to the original order before they can be paid. Budget limits trigger warnings before they are exceeded and, unsurprisingly, appear at the end of the month. And everything is logged in a central audit trail that is available for review at any time.
The human side of exam readiness
There is a human element here worth acknowledging. Finance teams that spend weeks preparing for audits are finance teams that aren’t producing higher-value work in that time. They do not analyze trends, manage cash flow, or support business decisions. They rummage through filing cabinets and chase colleagues for documents.
This is a poor use of skilled employees’ time and, in the long run, contributes to burnout, frustration and turnover in finance positions. A technology stack that automatically handles documentation and control gives these employees their time back, not just during exam season, but all year round.
Last word
If audit season still feels like a fire drill at your company, the problem probably isn’t with your finance team’s efforts or your auditor’s expectations. It’s the gap between how your day-to-day financial processes flow and what your auditors need to see at the end of the year.
Here’s what you should check now. First, consider whether your current systems capture a complete approval trail for every invoice, order, and expense report, or whether you rely on emails and verbal approvals, which are difficult to create later. Second, check whether your internal controls are built into your systems or whether they rely on individuals remembering to follow the correct steps. Third, ask your team how much time they spent preparing for the last audit and where the biggest delays came from.
Use these answers to learn exactly where your tech stack is working for you and where it’s causing additional work. Closing this gap is one of the most practical things any business owner can do to reduce audit stress, reduce audit costs, and free up their finance team to focus on what matters most.
