Audit Prep Services
Stop Auditing Into Shape. Start Showing Up Ready.
The annual audit shouldn’t feel like a fire drill. But for most finance teams, it is: internal staff pulled off their real jobs for weeks, old emails and shared drives dug through for missing documentation, and a final invoice from the CPA firm that’s higher than the engagement letter promised.
Loftis Consulting helps for-profit and nonprofit organizations walk into their audit already prepared, so the auditors confirm what you already know, instead of discovering what you don’t.
Call (312) 772-6105 for your free consultation.
Who We Help
Nonprofits that:
- Receive federal or state grant funds and need a Single Audit or a GATA-compliant audit
- Are preparing for their first financial statement audit
- Have funders, lenders or board members requiring audited financials
- Received findings or a management letter last year and don’t want a repeat
For-profit companies that:
- Face a first audit or one required by a lender, investor or private equity owner
- Are preparing for an acquisition, sale or financing
- Receive state or federal grant funds, which carry audit requirements of their own
- Have outgrown their bookkeeping and need audit-ready records
The Problem
When an external audit team hits missing receipts, unreconciled accounts, or undocumented internal controls, they don’t stop and wait. They expand their sample sizes, widen their testing scope, and bill you by the hour to clean up what should’ve been in order before they arrived.
Unpreparedness doesn’t just cost you money. It costs you:
- Scope creep: Billable hours stack up fast when auditors have to piece together transaction histories or untangle sub-ledgers themselves
- Internal burnout: Your finance team is stuck juggling daily operations with a frantic scramble for historic documents
- Management letter findings: A messy audit trail often turns into a material weakness or significant deficiency reported straight to your board or investors
- Funding risk: For nonprofits, weak grant documentation or late audit reports can put the funding itself in jeopardy
Here’s the insider truth: auditors don’t want to spend extra hours digging through your files any more than you want to pay for it. The businesses and nonprofits that come in organized are the ones that get out fast, clean, and on budget.
Do You Need A Single Audit?
A Single Audit is required when an organization spends $1 million or more in federal awards in a fiscal year. In Illinois, the Grant Accountability and Transparency Act (GATA) applies audit requirements to state grants as well, including for-profit grantees. Funders, lenders, state law and your own bylaws can require an audit even below those thresholds.
Not sure which audit applies to you? We’ll help you figure that out in your free consultation, before you spend anything on preparation.
How We Get You Ready
1. The Pre-Audit Review We conduct a proactive, internal pre-audit review roughly 90 days ahead of your fiscal year-end, focused on your highest-risk areas: confirming every Balance Sheet account has a matching subsidiary ledger, reviewing large journal entries made outside normal processing, and reconciling your physical asset registry to your books. Finding a discrepancy yourself means you fix it and document the resolution, turning the real audit into a routine confirmation instead of an investigation.
Already past year-end or in the middle of the close? We can start now and prioritize what matters most before fieldwork begins.
2. The Financial Clean Room We help you build an internal “clean room”, both a structural framework and a mindset shift, where every monthly close is treated like a mini-audit, so when the real auditors arrive, you’re not pulling data, you’re simply granting access. That means:
- Workpaper standardization: Every major Balance Sheet account gets a dedicated reconciling workpaper tied directly to third-party evidence: bank statements, inventory counts, vendor confirmations
- A real document repository: Invoices, contracts, board minutes, and grant letters organized and mapped to their transactions, not buried in someone’s inbox
- Visible controls evidence: If your policy requires executive sign-off over a certain dollar amount, we make sure that trail actually exists for every qualifying transaction
3. Grant & Single Audit Compliance For nonprofits and other organizations managing state or federal funding, we set up what auditors test:
- Fund accounting and grant tracking: Grant revenue and expenditures separated from general operations, so you can show dollar for dollar that funds were used as budgeted
- Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards (SEFA) support: A complete, reconciled inventory of your awards, which the Single Audit depends on
- Allowable cost and documentation files: Support for costs charged to each grant, organized by award
- Subrecipient and compliance documentation: Where you pass funds to others, the monitoring files auditors expect to see
- Internal control documentation: Written policies and evidence that controls operate as described
- Prior findings follow-up: A summary of prior audit findings and corrective action plans, so repeat findings don’t happen
Mishandled grant compliance creates audit findings and can jeopardize your next award. We build the documentation before the auditors ask for it.
4. The Auditor Handoff
We prepare the schedules and support behind the auditors’ request list (often called the PBC list) and organize them so your team can respond quickly. We can serve as your finance team’s point person during fieldwork, so staff stay focused on running your organization.
5. Turning the Audit Into a Roadmap
A clean audit opinion is an achievement, but it shouldn’t be the end of the conversation. We help you decode your management letter, the confidential document where auditors flag weaknesses that didn’t rise to a formal finding but still carry risk, and turn those observations into action: tighter segregation of duties, automated document workflows, and an updated policy manual so this year’s comments don’t return next year.
How We Work With Your Auditor
Your independent CPA firm performs the audit. We prepare you for it. We act as your mock auditor, impartially identifying gaps, spotting anomalies and organizing your schedules before the real engagement begins, and we do not perform audit or attest services. Already working with an audit firm? We’ll coordinate with them. Still choosing one? We can help you evaluate firms with the right experience for your size and budget.
What You Will Receive
- A written readiness assessment that ranks gaps by risk
- Reconciled, documented account workpapers
- An organized document repository ready for auditor access
- Grant and compliance files organized by award (for organizations with government funding)
- A prepared auditor request list and a clear timeline
- A post-audit action plan based on your management letter
Engagement Options
Audit Readiness Assessment: A fixed-fee review that tells you where you stand and what to fix.
Audit Prep Support: We work alongside your team through the close and auditor fieldwork.
Why Loftis Consulting
Kimberly Loftis is a CPA with an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and more than 20 years of finance experience. As CFO of the Chicago Urban League, she kept the organization in compliance with government contract requirements and bank covenants across multiple locations. Her corporate finance background includes HSBC and Exelon.
You get Fortune 500 rigor at the scale and speed a nonprofit or mid-sized business actually needs, from a boutique Chicago firm without the overhead of a Big 4 engagement.
Client result: First audit, no material findings. A client reached the federal funding threshold for the first time and went through its first audit. With our audit readiness work in place before fieldwork, the audit closed with no material audit findings.
“We had just crossed the federal funding threshold and were facing our first audit. Kimberly got us organized well before the auditors arrived, and the audit closed with no material findings.”
– Nathan Legardy, Executive Director of Wiz Kids Foundation, a Chicago nonprofit
Ready to make your next audit a formality instead of a fire drill? Call us today!