Client stories
Comments from recent engagements. We asked for specifics — which finding mattered, what felt slow — not polished slogans.
“They spent the first week inside our exception workbook instead of presenting a generic controls checklist. The finding on post-dated second approvals for vendor payments was uncomfortable, but specific enough that our AP lead knew exactly which steps to change.”
Fieldwork ran a few days longer than the original calendar because two process owners were on leave — worth planning for if your team travels often.
“The approval map they drew for expense claims showed three informal shortcuts we had stopped noticing. We used the briefing almost word-for-word with our audit committee.”
“We hired them for a pre-board snapshot with twelve days to spare. The aging view of open credit-note exceptions gave our chair something concrete to ask about, rather than another slide of green status dots.”
“Follow-up testing confirmed five of seven prior findings were properly closed. The two that remained open had owners who thought email reminders counted as evidence — that distinction alone justified the revisit.”
“Clear interviews, careful sampling, and a remediation workshop that stayed practical. They did not push us to buy anything beyond the engagement we asked for.”
Extended story: vendor payment second approvals
A Taoyuan manufacturing group asked for a Policy Exception Audit after their internal audit flagged rising overrides on vendor payment limits. Sampling three months of exceptions showed that second approvals frequently landed after the bank release — the form looked complete, the control did not operate in time.
We ranked the finding as high severity, mapped which desks shared banking tokens, and ran a half-day remediation workshop with AP and treasury. The controller later booked Remediation Follow-Up; five of seven agreed actions had solid evidence, and the two that did not hinged on email reminders mistaken for control performance.
That pattern — tidy paperwork, weak timing — is one we see often in Approval Chain Reviews as well. If it sounds familiar, an estimate conversation is a sensible next step.