What is the Audit Process? A Deep Dive into how Suralink Supports Auditors and their Clients Every Step of the Way

For auditors, efficiency, accuracy, and consistency are everything. Whether you're conducting internal reviews or external financial audits, navigating a complex and high-stakes audit process demands a clear methodology, repeatable workflows, and tight collaboration. But traditional tools—like spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected file sharing methods—can slow you down, introduce risk, and frustrate clients.

Tech-forward accounting firms and their audit teams are turning to platforms like Suralink to bring structure, visibility, and automation to every stage of the audit lifecycle.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through the 5 main stages of the audit process, highlight common challenges, and show how Suralink helps streamline the auditing process from planning, to testing, to review, and final conclusions.

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What Is the Audit Process? 

The audit process is a structured, repeatable set of steps designed to evaluate financial statements, test internal controls, verify compliance with regulations, and provide stakeholders with confidence in an organization’s reporting and risk management.

For auditors, the process isn’t just about identifying issues—it’s about delivering value through insights, improving control environments, and ensuring your audits meet professional standards and regulatory requirements. 

An audit provides an independent examination of financial statements (or other company processes), offering assurance that these statements are accurate, complete, and in accordance with regulatory standards. They generally fall into two broad categories:

• Internal audits, which focus on governance, risk, and operational efficiency
  
  
• External audits, which validate financial reporting for compliance and assurance purposes
  
  

In both cases, auditors must collect and manage detailed–and sensitive–documentation, collaborate with clients and internal stakeholders, and deliver actionable audit findings—all while maintaining independence, objectivity, and data security. On top of that, the goal is to complete audits on time and on budget while maintaining the best possible experience for everyone involved. 

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The 5 Stages of the Audit Process (and How Suralink Supports Each One)

Following a common audit process helps all parties stay organized, reduce risk, and drive successful outcomes. Here's how the process unfolds—and how Suralink supports you at every stage.

1. Audit Planning

Effective audits start with smart audit planning. This includes:

• Defining audit scope, objectives, timelines, and resources needed
• Conducting preliminary risk assessments
• Creating a structured audit plan and confirming it with the client

How Suralink Helps:
Suralink helps you plan for audits with configurable templates, reusable request lists, and permissioned client portals. You can build and manage the audit plan collaboratively, assign team members and client users, and start collecting information before fieldwork begins. You can also roll forward requests from prior years and start to create initial PBC requests. 

2. Preparation and Preliminary Review

This phase focuses on understanding the business and its controls:

• Gathering policies, process documents, and org charts
• Mapping out control environments and potential risks
• Reviewing prior audits or compliance reports

How Suralink Helps:
Use Suralink to securely request, collect, and organize documents in a centralized system that gives visibility to your team and your clients. Requests are tracked in real time, and version control ensures you’re always working with the most current files. You can tag clients and team members for quick, organized collaboration, speeding up the time needed to get the correct documentation.

3. Audit Execution and Fieldwork

This is the hands-on phase where you:

• Perform testing, finalize risk assessment, and determine materiality
• Collect audit evidence and follow up with clients to get accurate and complete documentation
• Conduct interviews and validate business processes
• Review workpapers to support final deliverables

How Suralink Helps:
Suralink’s Request List Management simplifies audit execution and fieldwork by offering real-time dashboards, comment threads, and clear visibility into what’s been provided by the client, what’s still needed, and who’s responsible. Its Excel-based add-in, Workpaper Suite, performs automated data matching and document linking to speed the process of workpaper preparation and review. 

4. Audit Reporting

Once evidence is gathered and reviewed, auditors summarize audit findings, provide an opinion, and communicate outcomes:

• Draft the audit report and opinion letter to formally present findings
• Validate findings, conclusions, and recommendations
• Secure approvals and share with stakeholders

How Suralink Helps:
All supporting documentation lives in one place, making it easy to trace findings back to evidence. You can create clear narratives using organized files, comments, and status updates. Suralink also makes it easy for senior team members to review documents, workpapers, and key actions performed during the audit. 

5. Follow-Up and Corrective Action

An audit is only as effective as the action it drives. The final stage includes:

• Monitoring remediation efforts
• Tracking implementation of control improvements
• Closing the loop for future audit readiness

How Suralink Helps:
At the end of an audit, Suralink makes it easy to deliver final reporting and secure all audit documentation and workpapers for future reference or regulatory review. Lock down files, ensuring no further edits can be made, and archive documentation as required by regulatory standards.

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Common Audit Challenges (And How to Eliminate Them)

Auditors often encounter friction points that impact their ability to be efficient, while still providing a good client experience:

Challenges:

• Manual request lists and fragmented documentation
• Poor communication between audit teams and clients
• Version control and audit trail issues
• Inconsistent workflows across teams or offices

Suralink Solutions:

• Centralized request tracking, file uploads, and real-time visibility for firm and client users
• In-platform commenting, tagging, notifications, and deadlines to keep everyone aligned
• Full audit trails, status tracking, secure storage, and syncing between PBCs and workpapers
• Standardized templates and role-based workflows that scale across engagements

 

Best Practices for a Seamless Audit Process 

To deliver high-quality audits efficiently, auditors should follow these proven strategies:

Standardize Your Workflow

Using consistent templates for requests, testing procedures, and reporting reduces errors and increases repeatability. Suralink lets you replicate successful audits across clients or entities.

Centralize and Secure Documentation

Don’t chase files across inboxes, desktops, or drives. Suralink provides a single source of truth for all audit documents with enterprise-grade security and built-in access controls.

Ensure an Accurate Audit Trail

Every action in Suralink is logged—from request creation to commenting to file upload—making it easy to support audit findings and maintain transparency.

Enable Real-Time Collaboration

Collaborate directly in the platform with clients or team members. Tag them in comments within documents for quicker resolution. Both clients and team members can see real-time status updates, engagement progress, and due dates. 

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Why Suralink Is Built for Auditors

Suralink isn’t just a document exchange tool—it’s a full audit process management platform that supports audit steps from request to test to final review.

With Suralink, auditors get:

• A streamlined, end-to-end workflow for the most critical steps of the audit process
• Real-time visibility across engagements and clients
• Secure, centralized access to all audit support documentation
• Seamless and organized client communication 
• A native integration between the client request list and Excel-based workpapers

Whether you’re managing hundreds of requests across multiple teams or running a solo audit with a complex client, Suralink scales with your firm—and adapts to the way you work.

The stages of an audit—planning, preparation, execution and fieldwork, reporting, and follow-up—require efficiency, organization, and a clear view of the status of all of these steps. The right tools make all the difference.

With Suralink, you can modernize your audit lifecycle, improve collaboration, and deliver higher-quality audits—faster.