Accounts payable audit
- What approval costs a month
- $4,300.80
- Hours on routine handling
- 120
- Hours on exceptions
- 14.4
Every figure on this page is computed from the inputs entered, by the method stated below it. Monthendly publishes no benchmark close time, no industry average DPO and no accounting standard: the tasks, the minutes, the rate and the exception rate are yours, and the defaults are a worked example to replace with your own figures.
An accounts payable audit asks a simple question in several directions: is everything that should be recorded recorded, is everything recorded genuine, and did the people who approved it have the authority to. Whether it is your auditor doing it or you doing it yourself before they arrive, the work is the same, and it is far easier when the answers are a by-product of how payables run rather than something assembled afterwards. This page sets out what an audit of payables actually looks at, the controls that make it short, and the search for unrecorded liabilities that catches most teams out.
Open the Accounts payable invoice approval process Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Completeness: the search for unrecorded liabilities
The classic procedure is to look at what was paid after the period end and ask which of it should have been in the period. A team that knows what was sitting unapproved at the cut-off can answer this in minutes; a team that does not will be reconstructing it from bank statements.
Authorisation: who approved, and could they?
Sampling invoices and tracing the approval is straightforward when approvals are recorded against the invoice and impossible when they live in email. Segregation of duties, so the person who sets up a supplier is not the person who pays it, is the control most often missing in small teams and most often asked about.
Existence: the supplier is real and the goods arrived
Matching to the order and the receipt is the evidence. Where three-way matching runs consistently the audit is a sample of a working control; where it does not, it is an investigation.
Accounts payable audit: common questions
What is the most common audit finding in payables?
In small teams, weak segregation of duties, usually because there are not enough people. That is not automatically a failure: it is manageable with a compensating control, such as a second person reviewing new suppliers and payment runs, provided you can show it happened.
How do we prepare for a payables audit?
Have the aging at period end, the list of what was unapproved at the cut-off, the approval trail for a sample, and the reconciliation of the payables ledger to the control account. If those four exist as records rather than rebuilds, the audit is short.
Is this accounting or audit advice?
Neither. It is a description of what payables audits generally look at. What your auditor will accept as evidence, and what framework applies to you, are questions for them and for your own accountants.
Monthendly Pro
Keeping what you make
The worksheets are free forever. Pro turns them into the record: the close checklist for each month with its owner and its dates, the payables queue that clears before the cut-off, the reconciliations attached to the month they belong to, your team's name on the pack, no watermark, and an export when the auditor asks.
- Download the finished sheet as a file
- Send it without the Monthendly line on it
- Save a close and reopen it next month
- Put your company name and logo on it
- Export every close and reconciliation at once
- Approval chases emailed to whoever is holding the close up
- Connect your own Stripe account and get paid online
- Connect your QuickBooks Online or Xero
$43per month, whole team
Start Monthendly Pro PricingRenews monthly at the price above until you cancel. We email you before any price change.
Will it do what you need for Accounts payable audit?
Tell us how your close runs and we will tell you straight whether Monthendly Pro fits it today, whether it is coming, or whether you need a different product instead. A person reads these and replies.
Cite or embed this figure
The four things an audit asks for at period end are the aging, the unapproved list, an approval sample and the reconciliation; on the worked example the aging alone accounts for $82,700.
Accounts payable invoice approval process (What approval costs a month): $4,300.80, Monthendly, worked example.
Cite as: "Accounts payable audit, Monthendly", updated 2026-09-04, https://monthendly.com/accounts-payable-audit/.