How the Top AR Leaders Turn Audit Season into a Checklist, Not a Crisis

Audit season exposes everything. Clean processes sail through. Gaps become crises.

We spoke to three finance and AR leaders across three different industries on our Heroes of AR thought leadership series and asked them the same question: how do you prepare for audit season? None of them said "start preparing in February."

Here's what they said instead.

What Auditors Actually Look For

Thomas Conforti manages credit and collections at Roehm, running one of the tightest AR books in the industry. His take on what internal audit cares about is refreshingly specific.

Our internal audit will look to make sure we're following our set credit policy. Are we stopping shipments when we need to? Are we escalating matters in the right time and to the right people? They'll take a sample of accounts - they noticed XYZ company was past due last month, then what happened? Who'd you tell? What was the story behind it?

The takeaway: auditors aren't just checking numbers. They're checking whether you acted on the numbers. Documentation of escalations, communications, and decisions matters as much as the aging report itself.

For AR teams, this means every blocked invoice, every escalation, every decision to hold or release a shipment needs a trail. If you're doing this manually across email threads and spreadsheets, you're creating audit risk by default.

Watch the full episode with Thomas Conforti now

‍Why It Shouldn't Be Chaos

Kelly-Anne Kratz runs AR at Greenhouse, where a team of four handles $250 million in revenue. She has the sharpest framing we've heard on audit readiness.

My hot take is that as far as AR goes, it's not a once-a-year thing. It's an every day, every week, every month thing. If you have your cash applied correctly every single day, your audit season should not be chaos. It should be a list of things that need to be pulled, compiled, and sent back to the auditor.

She backs it up with proof. A recent audit request - 12 line items - landed at 4:45 PM. She had it back within 15 to 20 minutes. Everything was already there: payments matched remittances, dates matched, dollar amounts matched. For past exceptions, notes were already attached explaining the variance with documentation included.

"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."

This is where automation earns its keep. When the audit request comes, you're pulling from a system that's already organized, not reconstructing history from scattered inboxes.

Watch the full episode with Kelly-Anne Kratz here

The CFO's Perspective: Audit Is Just a Mirror

Soumen Das is a CFO who has led multiple NASDAQ IPOs and currently oversees group financials across multiple healthcare entities. He sees audit through an entirely different lens - not as a test to pass, but as a reflection of what you've been doing all year.

Audit is not a challenge if you have good processes in place. It's just accounting for the activities you've done over the year. If for any transaction there is an audit trail, a sufficient trail, then audit is not a challenge for you.

He adds a layer that AR practitioners don't always consider: audit readiness has valuation implications. Investors scrutinize AR aging reports. If receivables are high and aging is long, it raises doubt about collectibility and directly suppresses company valuation. Keeping your AR clean isn't just about passing the audit - it's about protecting the financial standing of the business.

"Make sure you have controls and processes in place that can sustain the challenges of an audit, whether you're a public company or a private company."

Watch the full episode with Soumen Das here

The Common Thread

Three leaders. Three industries. Three roles. Same conclusion:

Audit readiness is not a season. It's a daily operating discipline built on clean cash application, consistent collections, thorough documentation, and systems that maintain a complete trail without manual effort.

If your AR team is scrambling every February, the problem isn't audit season. The problem is the other eleven months.

Growfin's AI-native AR automation platform gives finance teams timestamped audit trails, automated collection workflows, and real-time visibility across every customer touchpoint - so that when audit season arrives, it's a checklist, not a crisis.

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