How to Prepare for Audit Season (An SAP Finance Team’s Guide to Reducing Audit Risk)

For many finance teams, audit season is a stressful sprint. Balances are rechecked, reconciliations revisited, documentation rebuilt, and ageing items become urgent. But audit confidence isn’t created in those final weeks; it’s built through day-to-day financial operations year-round.

The organisations with the least disruption aren’t the ones working harder in Q4; they’re the ones investing in better control earlier in the cycle. Instead of treating audits as a deadline, they’re treated as an outcome of strong processes, consistent reconciliation, and embedded governance throughout the year.

Audit risk doesn’t start at audit. It builds over months as reconciliation and ownership gaps compound. Addressing it upstream helps strengthen SAP finance teams downstream.

Here are six practical steps to lower audit risk ahead of peak season:

1. Treat Reconciliation as Continuous, Not Period-End

One of the most overlooked contributors to audit stress is the misconception that the general ledger reconciliation process occurs at period-end. When reconciliation is compressed into the final days of month-end or quarter-end, exceptions surface late, documentation gaps have to be rebuilt, and ageing items require context that may no longer exist.

Continuous reconciliation flips that dynamic. By reviewing balances and clearing items throughout the month, finance teams can address discrepancies when they’re smaller, clearer, and easier to resolve. Thus preventing suspense balances, intercompany differences, and unreconciled accounts from stacking up over time.

Audit benefit: fewer surprises, fewer last-minute reconciliations, and far less remediation work once auditors are onsite.

2. Standardise Balance Sheet Reconciliations

Auditors look for consistency because it signals control. If every accountant reconciles differently or uses their own spreadsheet template, it’s difficult to demonstrate a controlled process. Even when teams do the right things, inconsistency makes auditors verify intent.

Standardising the balance sheet account reconciliation process ensures every period follows the same logic, documentation, and approval patterns. This reduces variation, smooths audit sampling, and makes turnover easier to manage by systemising the process instead of relying on individual workarounds.

Audit benefit: consistency becomes evidence of control and reduces clarifications during walkthroughs and testing.

3. Move from Line-by-Line Checking to Exception Review

Manual matching is still one of the biggest blockers during close. When finance teams check every line in every account, there’s no time left for analysis or resolving real issues. Automation changes this by turning reconciliation into an exception-based process.

Instead of checking everything manually, the system matches items and therefore highlights items that need human judgement. This speeds up SAP month-end and lets finance focus on value, not volume.

Audit benefit: fewer manual interventions and more meaningful exceptions give auditors confidence in the process.

4. Keep Reconciliation Inside SAP

When reconciliation data leaves SAP, control weakens. Spreadsheets and standalone tools create version issues, duplicate data, and fragmented evidence, and rebuilding the audit trail later becomes a manual task.

Keeping your reconciliation of ledger accounts inside SAP preserves data integrity, governance, and traceability. Approvals, adjustments, and documentation stay in the system of record, making ownership clear without extra effort.

Audit benefit: a cleaner audit trail that doesn’t require reconstruction or separate evidence packs.

5. Build Audit Trails Into the Process

Too often, audit documentation becomes a year-end project where evidence is compiled after the fact. But audits become much simpler when the audit trail is created through daily work instead of reconstructed later.

Embedded workflows, digital approvals, timestamps, attachments, comments, and clearing logs give auditors the information they need without pulling teams off their day jobs or rebuilding context months later.

Audit benefit: faster walkthroughs, fewer follow-up questions, and less time explaining historical decisions.

6. Assign Ownership Early

Lack of ownership is an underrated source of audit pain. When accounts, suspense balances, or intercompany positions don’t have clear owners, they pile up. Someone eventually has to resolve and explain them, and that ‘someone’ often becomes the finance team in Q4.

Clear ownership and escalation paths prevent unresolved items from ageing into bigger issues. When ageing thresholds are visible, and status can be monitored during the year, finance teams can address issues while they are still small and fresh.

Audit benefit: fewer stale balances to explain and less subjective interpretation during testing.

SAP-Native Automation Supports All Six Steps

The organisations making these improvements fastest are those with automation built directly into SAP. Tools like BEST automate matching, standardise reconciliation, provide real-time audit trails, and keep all adjustments within the SAP ecosystem.

This matters because it keeps control in SAP and turns the financial close into a system-driven process instead of a spreadsheet one.

Finance teams benefit from:

• Continuous reconciliation instead of last-minute cleanup
• Reviewing exceptions instead of checking everything manually
• One consistent workflow across teams and entities
• Automatic documentation and approvals already in the system for auditors
• Real-time visibility into risk and outstanding items
• Far less cleanup and remediation work at year-end

The result isn’t just faster closes, it’s smoother audits, because the work needed for audit season has effectively been done throughout the year.

Audit Confidence Begins Earlier Than Most Teams Think

The audit is just a checkpoint. Whether that checkpoint goes smoothly depends on the daily, monthly, and quarterly work of reconciliation and balance sheet control.

Reducing audit risk isn’t about extra preparation; it’s about building control into the processes finance teams already run. Standardisation, automation, clear ownership, and visibility make that possible, and the earlier they’re embedded, the more value they deliver.

If your audit season still involves last-minute fixes, re-explaining balances, or rechecking documentation, it’s time to strengthen the work upstream. The less remediation required in Q4, the more strategic capacity you unlock year-round.

Want to see how SAP-native automation can help your finance team reduce audit risk before peak season? Get in touch with BEST.