Communicating With Auditors: Best Practices

How you communicate with your auditor influences fee, timeline, and outcome more than most management teams realise. The principles are simple, proactive, factual, organised, but they require discipline.

Single point of contact

Designate one finance team member as the auditor's primary contact. All requests route through them; all responses come from them. This prevents conflicting answers from different team members and creates accountability for response times.

The contact should be senior enough to make judgement calls (CFO or finance director) but available enough to respond same-day to routine questions. A controller-level contact with CFO escalation works for most SMEs.

Document organisation

Build a single audit folder, structured by audit area: opening balances, revenue, receivables, inventory, fixed assets, payables, payroll, tax, and so on. Each folder contains the supporting evidence for that area.

Pre-populate the folder before fieldwork starts. Auditors love an organised file, fieldwork moves faster, and they form a positive view of management's controls. The reverse is also true: scrambled folders slow fieldwork and increase fees.

Response timing and tone

Acknowledge receipt of every request within 4 hours. Respond fully within 24 hours where possible. If a response will take longer, acknowledge with an estimated timeline. Silent gaps are the biggest source of audit timeline slippage.

Tone: factual, complete, brief. Answer the question asked, not adjacent questions. Avoid speculation. Avoid defensive language. The auditor's job is to ask questions; your job is to answer accurately. The relationship is professional, not adversarial.

Disagreements

Some audit conclusions you may disagree with, proposed adjustments you think are wrong, control findings you think are unwarranted. Raise the disagreement formally and in writing. Provide the basis for your view. The auditor will reconsider with documentation.

If you cannot agree, the audit partner makes the final call. Escalate beyond the partner only on rare occasions, to the auditor's quality review function, when you have substantive grounds. Most disagreements resolve through documented discussion.

This guide is general information, not professional advice. For situations that involve specific facts, talk to your accountant, or hire one of ours from the marketplace.