Audits are stressful – but it doesn’t have to be the fire drill most Finance and Accounting teams experience.
The best SaaS Finance teams aren’t scrambling when the PBC list hits their inbox. They’re already audit-ready because they’ve done the work upstream: unifying their data, cleaning their logic, and documenting supporting details clearly. For these teams, the close is faster (win!) – and it’s audit-proof (and board-ready, and FP&A-ready, and diligence-ready, etc.).
In this post, we’re breaking down The SaaS CFO's top tips for staying ahead of audit chaos and turning what used to be a high-pressure scramble into a moment of confidence.
Your auditors aren’t just checking boxes – they’re following the logic behind your revenue recognition. If your MRR schedule is vague, inconsistent, or manually compiled, you’re going to waste time defending it.
“Treat your MRR schedule like gold. It’s the source of truth for retention, CAC, and forecast credibility.” -Ben Murray, aka The SaaS CFO
What makes an MRR schedule audit-ready?
MRR is often one of the first schedules auditors request. If it doesn’t hold up, everything else gets more painful.
Audit prep is no longer about manually gathering files. It’s about providing structured, traceable proof that ties your reports back to the underlying data. The teams who are thriving during audit season have already invested in building that connective tissue.
That’s where Leapfin users are seeing massive time savings. One Controller told us:
“I used to spend 5 days assembling test transactions. Now I use Luca to pull them in seconds – and they’re cleaner than anything I’d do manually.”
That’s not just about speed – it’s about reducing risk. With AI tools like Luca, audit samples are pulled directly from your revenue subledger, with clear paths from event to recognition. Every transaction is accounted for, down to the source.
Time saved: days
Confidence earned: 100%
One of the most common audit traps? Co-mingled chaos. That’s when different customer types, billing models, or currencies are lumped into one report – and suddenly your revenue story gets very hard to follow.
Auditors (and your leadership) expect clarity:
If your systems can’t support that level of segmentation, your team ends up explaining – and re-explaining – the data. You become the bottleneck. Your audit becomes a grind.
The smartest Finance teams don’t view the audit as a compliance burden. They treat it as a litmus test for trust in their systems. If you’re constantly backtracking, explaining logic by hand, or manually updating reports – you don’t just have an audit problem. You have a data problem.
And like most problems in finance, the earlier you catch it, the cheaper it is to fix.
3 actions you can take this month to set your team up for audit success:
Getting audit-ready isn’t a heroic effort. It’s a systems decision. And the earlier you invest in clean, structured revenue data, the easier every future audit becomes.
Ben Murray shares more great tips in his talk from the recent Transform conference, High-Stakes SaaS Finance: The Blueprint for Audit-Proof, Board-Ready Revenue Data. Watch on-demand now.
Want to learn more about how Luca helps teams explore and report on revenue data faster and easier? Book a demo for your team.