PBC list management

PBC list management covers the full list your audit firm issues, broken into individually owned tasks with a due date tied to the engagement letter's overall timeline. We gather source documents from bank portals, vendor systems, payroll providers and your own internal records, and organize them into the folder structure the audit firm's request maps to. A shared tracker, built in the platform your firm already uses when they have one (SharePoint, a client portal, or a simple spreadsheet when they do not), shows delivered, pending and blocked status on every line. During fieldwork, follow-up requests are logged and routed the same day they arrive rather than batched for a weekly check-in, since fieldwork follow-ups usually carry a much shorter turnaround than the original list.

Work begins once your finance team receives the list from the audit firm, or once we are authorized to receive it directly. We read through every item, flag anything that is unclear or appears not to apply to your engagement, and confirm those flags with the audit firm before treating an item as not applicable. Each remaining item is assigned an owner, whether that is a document sitting in your bank portal, a schedule we already maintain, or a fact only someone on your team can confirm. As documents are gathered, the tracker updates in real time so status is visible without a separate meeting. When fieldwork opens follow-up requests, we log each one against the original list rather than treating it as a new, unrelated task.

Finance teams heading into their first audit who have never worked a PBC list and do not know how large the ask typically is. Controllers at growing companies who are already stretched between close, board reporting and daily operations, and cannot absorb another fifty-item list without dropping something else. Nonprofits and grant-funded organizations facing a single audit under federal award rules, where the list often spans multiple funding sources with different documentation standards. Multi-entity businesses where a single list actually needs to be split and tracked separately by entity or by funding source, since mixing them together creates confusion during review.

The most common problem is a list that sits half-worked in the final week because nobody owns it as a discrete task alongside everything else finance is doing that month. Another is items marked complete that turn out to be the wrong version of a document, an outdated lease amendment instead of the current one, which comes back as a review comment during fieldwork rather than being caught earlier. We also see requests that get stuck because the person who can actually produce the document, a bank relationship manager, a former employee's payroll file, is not the person the request was assigned to internally. Multi-entity engagements often struggle when one consolidated list gets worked without separating which items belong to which entity, so items get delivered against the wrong book.

We work inside whatever your audit firm already uses for document exchange, whether that is a dedicated portal such as SharePoint or a client-facing tracker the firm maintains, or a straightforward spreadsheet when the engagement does not use a platform. Source documents are pulled from your existing QuickBooks Online or Xero file, your bank's own document portal, Bill.com for vendor and payment records, and Google Drive or SharePoint for internal files such as board minutes and lease agreements. We do not require you to adopt a new system solely for this engagement; the tracking layer sits on top of tools you and the audit firm already use.

PBC list management is typically scoped as a fixed add-on for the audit season rather than an open-ended hourly engagement, since the list itself defines the scope once the audit firm issues it. Pricing depends on the number of line items, how many source systems the documents need to come from, and whether the engagement spans one entity or several. It is quoted once the actual list is in hand, since list size varies significantly by audit firm and by engagement type, and confirmed in writing before work starts so there is no ambiguity about what a fixed number of follow-up rounds covers.

Onboarding starts as soon as the list arrives or authorization to receive it directly is granted; there is no separate multi-week setup phase before work on the list itself begins. A typical engagement runs from the date the list is issued through the end of fieldwork, usually four to eight weeks depending on the audit's scope, with a lighter follow-up period after fieldwork closes while the audit firm finalizes its report. For repeat engagements, we begin from the prior year's archived package, which usually cuts the initial working time roughly in half since a large share of the list repeats year over year with only the current period's activity changing.

Every item marked complete is checked against the actual request wording before it is submitted, not just checked off because a document with a similar name exists somewhere. A senior team member reviews the tracker weekly during an active engagement to confirm nothing has stalled without an explanation attached. We do not make the allowability or applicability call on an item ourselves; when something looks like it does not apply to your engagement, that gets confirmed with the audit firm directly rather than assumed and left off the list.