Audit-Ready Files Pack

Most of the time an audit takes is not the auditing. It is finding documents, chasing suppliers for statements, explaining a bank reconciliation that does not agree and answering the same question three times. This pack puts those things in order before the auditor arrives, so the questions you get are about judgement, not about where the file is.

It is a preparation pack. It is not an audit and gives no assurance.

What is inside:

• A readiness checklist of 75 things auditors typically ask for, in 13 areas (governance, cash, receivables and revenue, inventory, fixed assets, payables, payroll and end of service, VAT and tax, equity and related parties, borrowings and leases, financial statements, post year-end and going concern, systems), each with the reason it is asked, an owner, a due date and a status
• A tracker for the auditor's own request (PBC) list: log each request, owner and due date, see days taken, days open and what is overdue
• A working paper index with preparer and reviewer sign-off and an automatic Complete, Needs review or Not prepared status
• Supporting schedules that you fill from your ledger: bank reconciliation summary, receivables and payables ageing with provision and statement agreement, fixed asset roll-forward with a depreciation reasonableness check, prepayments recomputed from dates, accruals compared with later payments, payroll register to ledger to WPS file, end-of-service provision roll-forward, and a quarterly VAT reconciliation
• A lead schedule that ties each trial balance line to its schedule and marks it Agrees, Explained or DIFFERENCE, and a Checks sheet that separates hard stops from open work
• A dashboard with a chart of readiness by area
• A Word guide: a twelve-week timeline, a working paper cover block and tick-mark legend, how to run the request list, questions auditors commonly ask, frequent adjustments, meeting agendas and a letter-of-points response template

The workbook ships with a fictional Dubai trading company so you can see every sheet working. Yellow cells are inputs, grey cells are formulas.

Who it is for: owners, finance managers and accountants of UAE small and medium businesses that have an external audit, a lender review or an investor review coming, and want to hand over a tidy set of files.

What it is not: it does not decide whether you need an audit or who may do it, it does not calculate end-of-service benefits or corporate tax, and tie-outs only prove that schedules add up to the trial balance, not that the numbers are right. Corporate tax appears only as a flagged placeholder to confirm with the FTA or your accountant. Your auditor's list overrides this one. A starting point your accountant should review.

Requirements: Microsoft Excel 2016 or later, Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc, and Word or Google Docs.