A Financial Audit & Assessment is a one-time, 30-day engagement, not an ongoing commitment. It exists for businesses that want a clear, honest read on where their financials actually stand before deciding what to do next, whether that's fixing what's broken internally, hiring ongoing fractional CFO support, or simply confirming that things are in better shape than they feared.
What the Audit Covers
Every tier includes the same core scope, at increasing depth:
- Audit of books and records. A full pass through your transactions, reconciliations, and chart of accounts to identify errors, miscategorizations, and gaps.
- Review of procedures and internal controls. How money actually moves through the business today, and where a single point of failure or a missing approval step creates real risk.
- Gap analysis. A direct comparison between where your financial operations are today and where they need to be for the business's actual size and complexity.
- Written report and a 1-hour debrief call. Plain-English findings and prioritized recommendations, not a document full of accounting jargon nobody on your team will read.
Choosing a Tier
| Tier | Starting Price | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Foundational | $2,500 | A first-time, general health check on a business with relatively straightforward operations. |
| Strategic | $5,000 | A business with more moving parts (multiple revenue streams, recent growth, or an upcoming raise) that needs a deeper look. |
| Executive | $10,000 | Higher-complexity operations, or a business preparing for something high-stakes like a sale, audit, or major capital raise. |
If you're not sure which tier fits, that's a normal first question to bring to a call rather than something you need to figure out on your own. See our pricing page for the complete rate structure across all services.
What a Typical Finding Looks Like
Every business is different, but a handful of issues show up often enough across audits that they're worth naming directly:
- Expenses categorized inconsistently month to month, which quietly distorts profitability reporting without anyone noticing.
- Bank and credit card accounts that haven't been fully reconciled in several months, which hides both errors and, occasionally, outright fraud.
- No clear separation between the owner's personal and business finances, which creates real tax and liability exposure.
- A single person with unchecked authority over both recording and approving transactions, with no second set of eyes.
- Revenue or cost of goods sold recognized on a timeline that doesn't actually match when the value was delivered, which misstates margin.
None of these are unusual, and finding them is the point of the engagement, not a sign something has gone badly wrong. The goal is catching and fixing them deliberately instead of discovering them later during a real audit, a due diligence process, or a tax filing.
How to Prepare
A little preparation on your end makes the 30 days move faster:
- Grant read access to your accounting software (QuickBooks Online or similar) rather than exporting reports manually.
- Have your last 12 months of bank and credit card statements available.
- Write down the specific questions or concerns that prompted the audit in the first place, even informally. That context shapes where we look first.
- Identify who on your team (if anyone) handles day-to-day bookkeeping, so we know who to loop in on questions.
What Happens After
You leave the engagement with a written report and a clear list of what to fix first, second, and third. Some businesses take that list and handle the fixes internally. Others choose to move into ongoing Fractional CFO services or targeted bookkeeping and cleanup work to actually execute on it. If you do move into ongoing Fractional CFO services afterward, your audit fee is applied as a credit toward your first month, so the audit isn't a sunk cost on top of the retainer.