How to Make Audit Season a Non-Event for Your AR Team

Key Takeaways from Growfin's webinar featuring Kelly-Anne Kratz, Senior AR Manager at Greenhouse

Audit season is the moment of truth for every AR team. But is it the cause of the chaos, or does it just shine a light on what's already broken?

Pradyut Hande, Associate Director of Product Marketing at Growfin, hosted a live webinar with Kelly-Anne Kratz, Senior AR Manager at Greenhouse, one of the leading hiring and applicant tracking software companies. Kelly-Anne manages a team of four that handles $250 million in revenue, powered by Growfin's AI-native AR automation platform.

The conversation covered why audit season feels like a fire drill for some teams and a checklist for others, what separates the two, and what AR leaders can do about it starting today.

Here are the key takeaways.

1. Audit season doesn't create problems. It exposes them.

Kelly-Anne opened with what she calls the accountant's version of the chicken or the egg:

"I've always felt that audit season just exposes any issues you currently have."

Her analogy: you don't wake up one day and decide to run a marathon. There are months of training that lead up to it. AR works the same way. If your processes are solid all year, audit season is just another week. If they're not, February is when you find out.

2. The biggest pain point: information scattered everywhere

During a live poll, the audience confirmed what Kelly-Anne suspected. The most common audit-season symptom is relying on multiple inbox searches to answer auditor questions.

"I can't tell you how many times early in my career, when audit season came up, the information is just everywhere. Sometimes it's locally saved on someone's drive. I can't even access it."

She compared it to filming a movie with different directors, different formats, different locations, and then trying to cut it into something coherent. The result: AR teams spend more time looking for answers than actually collecting.

This is where a consolidated AR inbox and centralized communication threads eliminate the problem entirely. When every customer interaction, dispute, and follow-up lives in one place with timestamps, the audit request becomes a search query, not a reconstruction project.

3. Monthly reconciliation is the real audit prep

Kelly-Anne's approach is simple: treat every month-end like a mini audit.

"If you do that 12 times throughout the year and you spend a couple extra minutes focusing on all the data that took place this month - were your invoices billed correctly, were your payments applied correctly, is there anything unapplied, outstanding credit memos - when audit season comes around, it's not even a question."

The proof: she received a 12-line-item audit request at 4:45 PM. She had it back within 15 to 20 minutes. The most tedious part was saving the PDFs. Everything else - payments, remittances, dates, dollar amounts - was already matched and documented.

"Doing your cash application daily and your collections weekly is a gift to your future self. It's a gift to future audit-season you."

4. Cash application is the foundation of everything

Before implementing Growfin, Kelly-Anne's junior team member was spending 45 minutes on a good day and up to 90 minutes on busy days applying cash every morning in NetSuite. The rest of the team couldn't start collections, reporting, or documentation until the banks were updated.

"No one should have to spend 90 minutes applying cash every morning."

After implementing Growfin's cash application, the daily bank reconciliation now finishes well before 9 AM, giving the entire team almost an hour back every day.

On accuracy, the system reaches 85 to 90 percent full-match rates. Payments that match go through with a quick visual review. The system also learns over time - if a customer operating under a different name sends a payment today, Growfin remembers that association for the next one.

"The 5 to 10 to 15% that's going to require human interaction - it's going to be those payments where customers operate under a different name we've never seen before, or they send money without any identifying factors. Those are the only two situations and that will never change."

The time to reach 85% match rate? About a month and a half to two months, accounting for the fact that Greenhouse's billing cycles are quarterly, semi-annual, or annual.

5. Automate the reminders. Humanize the conversation.

Kelly-Anne draws a clear line on where automation belongs in collections and where it doesn't.

Automated dunning handles the first wave: gentle reminders before and after due dates, periodic follow-ups. Growfin sends these automatically based on the collections strategy configured for each customer segment.

"It's out of sight, out of mind. Set it up, forget it, and our customers are being pinged periodically to remind them of their balances."

But once a customer responds with something other than a remittance, humans take over. The response might involve a service issue, a contract question, or a procurement delay. Those conversations require judgment, not templates.

This approach also addresses a behavioral shift Kelly-Anne has observed since 2020: customers are holding on to cash longer, pushing payments to the very last minute, which directly impacts DSO. Automated reminders ensure that regardless of changing customer behavior, the AR team is doing everything possible to keep payments close to terms.

6. Protect your team's morale during audit season

This one often gets overlooked. Kelly-Anne made it personal.

"If my team's not happy, I'm not happy. I work to serve them. They are the collectors, the cash appliers, the people doing the everyday work that brings the money in."

AR teams come off year-end exhausted. The new year is supposed to be the window for projects, initiatives, and catching their breath. Instead, audit season drops another layer of pressure.

Kelly-Anne's team has turned this around. This year, audit requests have been 20 to 40-minute tasks, not multi-day derailments. The team still hits collections targets, still applies cash on time, still attends meetings - and wraps audit requests between lunch breaks.

"If I'm eating lunch and I see an audit request come through, by the time I'm back at my desk someone on my team's already wrapped it up with a bow."

That's what happens when processes are tight and tools do the heavy lifting.

The Bottom Line

Audit season will always come. The question is whether it disrupts your team for weeks or gets handled in minutes between other tasks.

The difference comes down to three things: clean cash application every day, consistent collections every week, and a system that maintains a complete, searchable trail without manual effort.

Kelly-Anne put it best: it's a marathon, not a sprint. Train all year, and the race is just another run.

Growfin's AI-native AR automation platform helps finance teams automate collections, accelerate cash application, and maintain audit-ready records year-round - so that when auditors come knocking, it's a checklist, not a crisis.

Watch the full webinar recording →