Audit readiness is the condition of your books when a financial statement audit can start on the auditor's timetable: each balance reconciled with its support, each journal entry carrying its preparer, approver and evidence, and a record that each control ran. Your team answers the auditor's request list from what it keeps, without rebuilding anything.
If your team gets ready once a year, in the weeks before fieldwork, readiness means reconstruction. In Rever, Evidence keeps the support with the work as it happens, so your books are as audit-ready in March as in December.
The scramble after sign-off
Your team closes the month, signs off and moves to the next one. The support stays where the work happened: a bank statement in a shared drive, an approval in an email thread, a reconciliation workbook on one accountant's laptop, a vendor credit note in someone's downloads folder. Months later the auditor sends the PBC list, the prepared-by-client list of schedules and documents the audit needs, and someone on your team answers it from inboxes.
That person spends fieldwork rebuilding the year. They find the approval for a March accrual in a forwarded email. They rerun a reconciliation that a colleague prepared before leaving in the spring. A sampled entry with no support goes back to the auditor as a gap, and the auditor widens the sample.
An auditor wants evidence created at the time of the work. A file your team assembles in month ten shows what it could find in month ten, and each gap in that file costs another request and another week of the controller's time. Readiness that holds from one audit to the next has to come from the month's own records: support captured at the moment of the work, by whoever does the work, before anyone asks for it.
Evidence on the record, from the day of the work
At month-end, Close Orchestrator tracks each line of the close, and Evidence, the Rever agent that leads audit readiness, attaches the support to each entry as the work completes: the bank record, the invoice, the amendment and the approval. Evidence links each entry to its documents and each document back to every entry it supports, and it extends the chain back to the purchase order or contract and forward to settlement and the financial statement line. It tests the other direction too, so a document with no accounting behind it surfaces as a finding, the same as an entry with no support.
For fieldwork, Evidence prepares a diligence index, a two-way matrix of entries and documents, and an outstanding document request list, with missing or inaccessible support disclosed. Records stores each document once, linked to the work, and the Excel workbooks carry their source references. Your controller agrees the PBC list with your audit firm, and most lines on it point to a workbook or a record that already exists. Rever prices by scope, so everyone who reviews, approves or audits the work can be in Rever, and your auditor can follow a sampled invoice to its order, receipt, payment and entry.
The controls sit in the same record. Your team sets materiality and approval paths, entity by entity, including approval thresholds and dual approval for material amounts. Every approval, question and send-back is a recorded decision in the Inbox, with what happened next, and Journal cannot approve its own entry. The floors set the base: Rever never writes to your systems, nothing leaves Rever without a recorded approval from an authorised approver, and the identity that prepares an item cannot approve it. Sentinel flags suspicious vendor-bank changes and payment patterns for human review. Your auditor can test segregation of duties from the decisions themselves.
Your auditor tests work an agent prepared the way they test a person's work: pick a sample, then check who prepared each item, who approved it and what evidence sat in front of them. Each sampled number drills down to the finding, the Inbox decision, the workpaper, the record and the verified outcome. Before fieldwork, Auditor, the Rever agent that tests the other agents, has reperformed selected calculations and matches and reported the procedures it could not test. Steward records gaps in source coverage, so the evidence pack states what could not be checked.
The audit readiness checklist
These thirteen lines appear on a typical request list for a financial statement audit. The table names who prepares each one in Rever and who signs or owns it.
| Line | Prepared by | Signed or owned by |
|---|---|---|
| Trial balance and lead schedules | Your team, from the closed period | Your controller |
| Bank and balance reconciliations, with support | Matcher reconciles each item; Investigator traces unexplained differences; Evidence links each item to its statement line and posting | Your controller signs each reconciliation |
| AR and AP agings, tied to the ledger | Your team, from the ERP | Your controller |
| Journal entries, with approver and evidence | Journal prepares supported entries | An approver within your thresholds; two on material amounts |
| Accruals and estimates, with their basis | Journal prepares accruals with calculation support; Close Orchestrator reconciles estimates to later actuals | Your controller |
| Inventory counts and valuation | Inventory reconciles counts and recomputes valuation; Evidence keeps count sheets and confirmations | Your controller |
| Fixed asset and other roll-forwards | Your team | Your controller |
| Revenue contracts and cut-off support | Your team; Matcher tests invoice and delivery dates against the period | Your controller |
| Debt agreements and covenant calculations | Your team | Your CFO |
| Equity and cap table | Your team | Your CFO |
| Board minutes | Your legal team or corporate secretary | Your CFO |
| Approval matrix and segregation of duties | Your team sets approval paths in Settings; the Inbox records each decision | Your CFO or controller |
| The PBC list | Evidence prepares the diligence index and the outstanding document request list | Your controller agrees the list with your audit firm |
Close Orchestrator shows which close procedures were completed with support and which remain qualified, so your team finds an unsupported balance sheet reconciliation in the month it happens, while the evidence is a few days old. A month with Rever shows where this work sits in the month, and the month-end close checklist gives the full sequence with the preparer and signer for each line. Controllers who want the same close from their own chair can read The close and the auditor. The audit readiness page shows how Rever runs this work in the product.
Find the gaps before fieldwork
The zero-day scan is the first pass over your connected records once read-only access is in place. It applies the relevant reconciliations, verifications and controls to the in-scope population and reveals initial findings with the evidence behind them, and for audit readiness it reports the inspected population, the completed checks and the missing evidence. Missing sources and blocked procedures stay visible. You get the gaps an auditor's sample could reach while you have time to close them.
