The Audit Prep Project is a 📝BrightZen service that prepares a company for its first financial audit by building and maintaining balance sheet reconciliation tools and serving as the point of contact for its external auditors.
The first audit for 📝Rapidly growing companies is time consuming and challenging. The audit prep work begins with a project plan that prioritizes each balance sheet account, a shared folder system where reconciliation tools live and are updated on schedule, and reconciliation tools with an easy-to-follow checklist for updating them.
Once the tools exist, the service holds a weekly 30-minute meeting with the accounting team to review progress and identify bottlenecks, maintains the reconciliation tools using BrightZen's offshore team, identifies errors monthly and works with the operational accounting team to fix and avoid them, and puts written SOX-compliant procedures in place so the associated audit tasks are completed as part of ongoing operations.
For auditor facilitation, the team acts as the company's point of contact with its external auditors and completes the workpapers they require with only minimal interaction with the operational accounting team.
As a company approaches an IPO, four more advanced areas of accounting become required: equity 📝Roll-Forward accounting, equity compensation accounting, deferred tax accounting, and SEC-quality financial statements and footnotes. These can sometimes be deferred or included in the project, but they eventually have to be done.
The first audit is completely unimportant to the operations of the business, which makes it a great candidate for outsourcing to a team that specializes in it.