Audit season is one of the busiest times of the year for CPA firms. Unfortunately, according to data from Jefferson Wells’ 2024 Internal Audit Priorities survey, 66% of internal audit teams lack the capabilities to meet their organization’s demands, leading to missed deadlines, increased error rates, and staff burnout. It also limits your firm’s ability to take on additional engagements during audit season, further restricting growth opportunities.
Which is why many firms are now looking to ‘work smarter’, many firms are now looking to “work smarter” by leveraging remote audit support teams like Scrubbed to help in audit preparation. This article explores how outsourced audit prep can transform your audit season—enhancing security, ensuring quality, and improving efficiency.
What is PBC and How Do Outsourced Teams Help?
Prepared by Client or PBC refers to the list of documents and schedules an audit client must provide to allow auditors to perform their procedures efficiently. This list usually includes trial balances, general ledger (GL) details, bank statements, fixed asset schedules, debt agreements, and supporting reconciliations required for audit testing and confirmation procedures.
Collecting and managing PBC items is often one of the biggest bottlenecks in audits, as delays in client responses, incomplete documentation, and repeated follow-ups can drain staff time and slow down the audit cycle. In fact, in a mid-sized firm, even a three-day delay on critical PBC items can push testing and review back by a full week, creating a domino effect that affects delivery deadlines across multiple engagements.
PBC quality is also a strong early indicator of audit efficiency, as high-quality and timely PBCs allow audit teams to begin testing without unnecessary idle time. By leveraging remote outsourced PBC assistance, firms can accelerate their audit timeline and ensure consistent PBC quality, organized file management, and clear tracking of outstanding requests.
Aside from that, outsourced teams can support your audit preparation by pulling and formatting trial balances, reconciling and preparing GL detail reports, and organizing fixed asset schedules in alignment with your firm’s templates and requirements. This reduces the rework often needed when client-prepared schedules arrive in inconsistent formats, allowing your audit teams to focus on higher-level testing and analysis rather than administrative cleanup.
How Offshore Teams Complete Audit Schedules
Offshore teams can accurately prepare audit schedules using your firm’s templates, audit software, and documentation standards. This allows you to schedule prep during peak periods without the need to hire costly seasonal staff.
In fact, offshore teams routinely prepare the essential schedules needed for audit testing, such as cash lead sheets, accounts receivable and accounts payable aging reports, fixed asset rollforwards, and debt and equity schedules. Using testing documentation tools such as Excel-based templates, audit software workpapers, and shared portals, outsourced teams can efficiently complete schedules while maintaining alignment with your firm’s workflow.
Quality and consistency are maintained through SOPs and structured workflows. Each prepared schedule undergoes checks for accuracy and format compliance before delivery, reducing back-and-forth corrections during fieldwork. This ensures that schedules are consistent across engagements, reducing the time senior auditors spend on formatting issues and allowing CPA firms to better utilize high-cost resources on high-value work.
How Firms Securely Share Documents with Outsourced Teams
Firms can securely share documents with outsourced teams by using encrypted file-sharing platforms aligned with confidentiality protocols. These protocols aren’t just for internal use; they also help you reassure clients that their data is protected even when the work is being outsourced.
As an added measure of security, you can also implement access-based controls to restrict file visibility to authorized team members only while NDAs and SOC 2-aligned environments further protect client confidentiality. Meanwhile, version control systems and clear naming conventions prevent confusion around document versions, ensuring auditors always review the correct files during testing.
Four Audit Prep Tasks That are Easy to Offload
- PBC list follow-up and document collection
- Lead sheet creation and reconciliations
- Tick-marking and workpaper indexing
- Gathering audit evidence (bank statements, confirmations, legal letters)
These tasks are time-consuming yet critical for audit readiness, making them ideal for outsourcing. With the workload freed up, your senior staff can focus on more strategic tasks like risk assessment, client consultation, and testing procedures.
Ways to Ensure Workpaper Accuracy Remotely
Workpaper accuracy in outsourced audit prep can be maintained through SOP-driven workflows, structured reviews, and alignment with your firm’s documentation standards. Experienced preparers trained in U.S. GAAP and audit documentation can even complete schedules using standardized templates and tick-marking conventions tailored to your firm’s requirements.
To further improve accuracy, workflows often include a multi-tiered review structure, where the schedules are prepared by an associate and then reviewed by a senior associate or manager before delivery to your team. This layered approach helps catch any errors and ensure alignment with PBC requests.
Meanwhile, real-time collaboration tools like Slack and Teams can help facilitate prompt clarifications and feedback loops, ensuring consistency across engagements without delaying fieldwork.
The Ideal Turnaround Time for Audit Testing
Most outsourced audit prep teams typically provide a 24-to-48-hour turnaround for testing documentation, depending on the complexity and data provided by clients. This rapid turnaround helps audit teams test samples as soon as the selections are made, allowing them to deliver reports to clients on time, even during peak periods.
Can Outsourced Teams Communicate with Auditors Directly?
Outsourced teams can communicate with auditors directly as long as clear protocols and boundaries have been established beforehand. It’s important to assign points of contact and define the questions that your outsourced team can handle to allow for more efficient collaborations while maintaining client confidentiality.
There are several benefits to allowing direct communication between your outsourced team and auditors.For one, it reduces the delays caused by back and forth communication through intermediaries, allowing your outsourced team to clarify requests and resolve discrepancies quickly. This approach also builds accountability and alignment and helps audit teams keep the workflow moving without any idle time.
Pricing Models for Audit Support Services
- Hourly pricing – With hourly billing, you only pay for the actual hours worked on specific tasks, making it ideal for firms with ad hoc or short-term support needs.
- Per-project pricing – This pricing model is best for fixed-scope engagements like annual audit prep, as it allows your team to plan their workload more effectively.
- Full-time equivalent pricing – Firms that need ongoing, high-volume support can opt for full-time equivalent pricing, allowing them to secure a dedicated offshore team.
How Internal Control Documentation is Handled
Offshore teams can support internal control documentation by preparing, formatting, and organizing walkthroughs, control narratives, and control matrices. They can also tag control points to align with relevant assertions and align documentation with your audit methodology, allowing your in-house team to focus on higher-value testing and analysis.
By working closely with your engagement managers, outsourced teams can handle documentation efficiently while maintaining consistency across audit files.
Can Outsourced Teams Reduce Audit Findings?
While outsourced teams don’t eliminate audit findings, they can help reduce the risk of avoidable issues by ensuring that reconciliations, schedules, and documentation are complete and accurate before testing begins. Timely reconciliations, clear schedules, and organized workpapers all help prevent surprises during fieldwork and support faster resolution of potential issues
Offload the Audit Stress, Not the Standards
CPA firms no longer have to choose between maintaining quality and managing capacity during audit season. By offloading their time-intensive audit prep tasks to specialized outsourced teams like Scrubbed, firms can confidently scale engagements while continuing to deliver the high standards clients expect.
Scrubbed’s outsourced audit support services are built to integrate seamlessly with your firm’s existing processes, tools, and workflows. From PBC tracking and schedule preparation to control documentation and reconciliations, we help clear bottlenecks before they slow you down—so your team stays focused, your audits stay on track, and your clients stay impressed.
Talk to Scrubbed about your next audit season—and let’s streamline it together.
