Audit season has a reputation for being one of the most stressful periods in any finance team’s year. The weeks leading up to it tend to involve late nights, frantic email chains, and a growing pile of documents that should have been organised months ago.

For many businesses, the experience feels like cramming for an exam they knew was coming but never quite prepared for.

The thing is, most of that stress is avoidable. It doesn’t come from the audit itself. It comes from the systems and processes sitting underneath it, the ones that were never really set up with audit readiness in mind.

The real source of audit stress

When auditors arrive, they need a clear trail of evidence. They want to see how financial decisions were made, who approved what, whether purchases were properly authorised, and whether the numbers in the accounts match the supporting documentation. That’s the job. And when everything is well organised and accessible, audits move quickly and cost less.

The problem is that in many small and mid-sized businesses, that evidence is scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets, shared drives, and sometimes the memory of the person who handled the transaction. Approval records might exist as a forwarded email from six months ago. Purchase orders might have been verbally agreed. Expense claims might have been signed off on paper and then filed in a drawer that nobody has opened since.

Research from Ardent Partners found that organisations without automated processes take an average of 17.4 days to process a single invoice from receipt to payment. When you multiply that kind of lag across hundreds of transactions, you start to see how the documentation trail can become fragmented well before audit season even begins.

Your tech stack is either helping or creating extra work

Most businesses have some form of accounting software in place. That’s a given. But the accounting system itself only tells part of the story. It records transactions after they’ve happened. What it doesn’t always capture is the decision-making process that led to those transactions – who requested the spend, who reviewed it, who gave the go-ahead, and whether it fell within budget.

This is where the broader tech stack matters. The tools that sit around your accounting system, handling approvals, managing purchase orders, routing invoices for review, and capturing supporting documentation, are what determine whether your audit preparation takes days or weeks.

When those tools work well together, the audit trail builds itself as part of everyday operations. Every invoice that gets approved, every purchase order that gets signed off, every expense that gets reviewed leaves behind a clear, searchable record. When audit time comes, you’re not reconstructing the story from fragments. You’re simply sharing what’s already there.

What auditors actually want to see

It helps to think about this from the auditor’s perspective. They’re not trying to catch you out. They’re trying to verify that your financial records are accurate, complete, and supported by proper controls. The easier you make that for them, the faster the audit goes, the fewer follow-up questions come back, and the lower the overall cost.

There are a few things that consistently make auditors’ lives easier:

• A clear record of who approved each financial transaction and when
• Evidence that purchase orders were raised before invoices were paid, not after
• Documentation showing that spending stayed within approved budgets
• An accessible trail of comments, notes, and supporting documents attached to each transaction

None of this is revolutionary. But producing it reliably and consistently is where most businesses struggle, especially when the process for capturing it is manual or informal.

Building audit readiness into daily operations

The most audit-ready businesses aren’t the ones that scramble to prepare in the weeks before auditors arrive. They’re the ones where preparation happens automatically as part of how the business runs day to day.

This is the shift that makes the biggest difference. Instead of treating audit readiness as an annual project, it becomes a byproduct of good financial processes. When your accounts payable automation captures every step from invoice receipt to approval to payment, and when your approval workflows log every decision with timestamps, comments, and the identity of each approver, you’re building your audit file continuously without anyone having to think about it.

The UK’s accounting and auditing industry is valued at £8.8 billion as of 2024, and audit fees have been rising steadily. For SMEs, where every pound spent on professional services matters, reducing the time your auditors need to spend requesting and verifying information can have a direct and meaningful impact on the final bill. Auditors typically price by time, so anything that reduces the hours they spend chasing documentation is money back in your pocket.

The controls gap that catches businesses out

Beyond documentation, auditors also look at internal controls. They want to understand whether your business has proper checks in place to prevent errors and fraud. This is where businesses that rely on informal processes tend to get caught out.

If a single person can raise a purchase order, approve the invoice, and process the payment without any oversight, that’s a control weakness. If there’s no systematic way to check whether an invoice matches the original order, that’s another one. These gaps don’t just create audit findings – they create real financial risk for the business.

Building strong financial controls into your tech stack means that these checks happen automatically. Purchase orders route to the right approver based on value and department. Invoices get matched against the original PO before they can be paid. Budget limits trigger alerts before they’re exceeded rather than showing up as a surprise at month end. And all of it gets logged in a central audit trail that’s ready for review at any time.

The human side of audit readiness

There’s a people element here that’s worth acknowledging. Finance teams that spend weeks preparing for audits are finance teams that aren’t doing higher-value work during that time. They’re not analysing trends, managing cash flow, or supporting business decisions. They’re digging through filing cabinets and chasing colleagues for documentation.

That’s a poor use of skilled people’s time, and over the long term it contributes to burnout, frustration, and turnover in finance roles. A tech stack that handles the documentation and controls automatically gives those people their time back, not just during audit season but throughout the year.

Final word

If audit season still feels like a fire drill in your business, the issue probably isn’t your finance team’s effort or your auditor’s expectations. It’s the gap between how your daily financial processes run and what your auditors need to see at year end.

Here’s what to check right now. First, look at whether your current systems capture a complete approval trail for every invoice, purchase order, and expense claim, or whether you’re relying on emails and verbal sign-offs that will be difficult to produce later. Second, review whether your internal controls are built into your systems or whether they depend on individuals remembering to follow the right steps. Third, ask your team how much time they spent preparing for the last audit and where the biggest delays came from.

Those answers will tell you exactly where your tech stack is working for you and where it’s creating extra work. Closing that gap is one of the most practical things any business owner can do to reduce audit stress, lower audit costs, and give their finance team the space to focus on what actually matters.