Arcvue
Audit & diligence readiness—for contractors, auditors, and the firms who serve them
Documentation built continuously. Not assembled under pressure.
The difference between a six-week audit and a four-month one is decided long before the engagement starts. Arcvue produces the prepared-by-client list as a by-product of closing the books, so what an examiner asks for is already what the business ran on.
| What the auditor asks for | Where it already lives | Assembled by |
|---|---|---|
| Trial balance, period | The ledger. Both columns at 23,843,900.00. | Nobody |
| Receivables aging | Accounts 12.10, 12.20, and 12.90, invoice by invoice | Nobody |
| Indirect rate history | Monthly, because the rates are computed nightly | Nobody |
| Cost pool detail | The pools and bases the rates were struck from | Nobody |
| Support for a sampled hour | Nine events on the entry, none reconstructed | Nobody |
Synthetic. An invented firm. The third column is the whole page. Every item on a prepared-by-client list is something the business already computed in the ordinary course of closing its books—and the alternative is three weeks of somebody finding it again.
Specimen Systems LLC · an example 120-person contractor · all figures synthetic
Three parties want the same thing, and normally only one of them can get it.
A GovCon contractor being audited, the external auditor doing the work, and the outsourced accounting firm that keeps the books for both—all three are trying to establish the same fact: that the numbers are supported. They spend most of an engagement discovering that they are not looking at the same documents.
| Party | The problem today | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| The contractor | Three weeks of finance assembling documents that exist across different systems in different formats | The documents were produced by closing the books, not by preparing for the audit |
| The auditor | Requesting, waiting, reconciling what arrives against what was asked for | Pull the trial balance, aging, rate history, and pool data directly—without requesting it |
| The outsourced firm | Clients who stopped asking for reporting, which reads as satisfaction | Deliver it without adding hours, because it is generated rather than produced |
Screen Arcvue audit readiness, three-party view. Read this one row by row. The three parties are alternatives, not components, so there is nothing to total. Synthetic sample.
Reconstruction under pressure is not the same document, and it is a worse one.
A document you can produce is not a document you have.
A schedule maintained continuously and the same schedule rebuilt in three weeks under deadline are not two routes to one artifact. The reconstructed one is more likely to be wrong—not through carelessness, but because it is assembled from memory of which tab feeds which, by people doing it alongside their real work, at the one moment nobody has any slack.
And an inconsistency found in a reconstructed document does not stay local. It is the same cascade the sell-side page prices: one figure nobody can source tells an examiner something about every other figure, and sampling gives way to a census. The difference between a six-week engagement and a four-month one is rarely the complexity of the business.
The test, and it is a useful one to apply to your own close. Pick any figure an auditor would sample. Ask how long it takes to produce the support—not to find someone who knows where it is, but to produce it. If the answer is measured in days, the document does not exist yet; what exists is the ability to make one. On Arcvue the answer is a query, because the support was written at the same moment as the entry.
The prepared-by-client list is generated, and the receivables tie without anyone tying them.
The list is not a folder somebody fills. Arcvue runs it as a set of queries against the ledger that closed, so the schedules an auditor receives are the schedules the business actually ran on—and they foot because the ledger foots, not because a spreadsheet was balanced to make them.
Source the trial balance this whole site is built on, accounts 12.10, 12.20, and 12.90. Basis unbilled receivable is its own line rather than folded into billed, because in GovCon the gap between work performed and work invoiced is one of the first things an examiner tests. Synthetic sample.
The same holds for the harder requests. Indirect rate history exists monthly rather than annually, because the rates are computed every night from actual pools—so a three-year history is a query, not a reconstruction. And when an examiner samples a single hour, the support is the nine events already on the entry.
You can answer your own questions before anybody else asks them.
The most expensive findings are the ones discovered by somebody else. A contractor can pull the trial balance, the aging, the rate history, and the pool data directly and run the examination on themselves—not as a rehearsal, but because the same queries an auditor would run are available to the person being audited.
An auditor gets the same access from the other side, granted by the client and scoped to what was agreed. The request-and-wait loop is not made faster; it is removed, and what remains is the part of an audit that requires professional judgment rather than document logistics.
And the close is signed against a computed list. Before a period is marked closed, Arcvue surfaces unusual movements, accounts that did not behave like their own history, and items still sitting in an escalation queue. The reviewer still signs. What changes is that they are signing against something somebody computed rather than against a feeling that it looked about right.
The client who stopped asking is not satisfied.
Outsourced accounting firms read a quiet client as a happy one. Usually the client is quiet for a different reason. Clients stop asking for reporting because they have concluded you are already stretched—and a client who has stopped expecting something they still want is a client already comparing you to alternatives.
The reason the request went unmet is real: producing a board pack, a covenant package, and a division summary by hand costs hours the engagement does not price. Arcvue generates all three on the close event rather than having somebody produce them, so they cost no hours at all—which turns the thing you could not afford to offer into the thing that distinguishes the engagement.
Scope is a property of the reader, not a separate export. A firm serving several clients gives each one exactly its own view, and a client's division leads see only their own contracts. The export prepared by hand is the one that leaks—not through carelessness, but because somebody under time pressure copies a tab.