Surviving an audit of the final account
An auditor is not looking for fraud. They are looking for figures that cannot be traced back to a document, and every account has some.
QScope Team · 24 March 2026 · 4 min read
Audit arrives on public sector work, on funded schemes, on grant-funded projects and on anything that ends up in an insurance claim. The auditor may be internal, external, or acting for a lender.
They are all doing the same thing: taking a figure and asking what it rests on.
The three questions
- Was it authorised? Is there an instruction from somebody who could give one.
- Was it valued correctly? Under the contract rules, with the basis stated.
- Was it certified and paid? Does the money that left match the account.
Any figure that cannot answer all three is a finding, regardless of whether it was reasonable, necessary or agreed by everyone at the time.
What gets flagged most often
- Variations with no instruction, or an instruction from someone outside the contract.
- Dayworks with unsigned sheets.
- Provisional sums expended without an instruction.
- Round-number settlements with no supporting calculation.
- Loss and expense as a single figure with no basis.
- Certified value exceeding the value of work actually in place at that date.
The negotiated settlement problem
Commercial settlements are the hardest thing to present to an auditor. A global figure agreed to close six disputes is entirely proper commercially and looks like an unexplained number in a file.
The answer is to record the reasoning at the time: what was in dispute, what each side claimed, what was settled and on what basis. A settlement with a memorandum behind it is defensible. The same settlement with nothing behind it is a finding.
The audit trail
Who changed what and when. On a manually maintained account that record does not exist, so the answer to when a variation was valued is whenever the file was last saved.
An unalterable log of changes is worth having for exactly this reason, and it is worth its keep the first time a figure is queried.
Preparing for one
Assume every line will be asked about. Before the account closes, run through it and mark anything that could not answer the three questions. Then fix what can be fixed while the people involved are still available.
That exercise takes a day and it is always cheaper than doing it under audit, eighteen months later, from an archive.
QScope records who changed what and when in an audit trail that cannot be edited, alongside the certificates the account is built from.