Ready When It Counts: How to Ensure Your School’s Finance System Is Audit-Ready

Audits are not only about last year.
They show how ready your systems are for the year ahead.

For school finance teams, year-end is already a full plate. You are closing off budgets, preparing board reports and keeping daily processing moving. Then the auditors arrive and the questions start.

It is easy to treat the audit as a once-a-year scramble. Pull the files. Answer the questions. Fix the issues. Move on.

Schools that have calmer audits do something different. They use year-end as a chance to check a few basics in their accounts payable (AP) system:

• Can auditors see what they need without slowing the team

• Do invoices, cards and staff claims tell one clear story

• Is invoice backup easy to find

• Do open POs, budgets and GL years behave the way they should at year end
  

This article walks through those areas.

If you already use Alii, it will help you tune how Alii supports you from the first day of the new period. If you are still working in a more manual way, it gives you a picture of what “audit ready AP” looks like in practice.

From a once-a-year event to an audit ready system

In earlier Alii blogs we have talked about AP automation as a way to move away from paper and manual data entry. Digital workflows, approvals and audit trails inside the system make audits easier.

Many schools now want the audit to feel like a natural check of how their system runs, not a separate project.

That leads to simple questions.

• Can an auditor follow an invoice all the way from request to payment

• Do approvals and delegations live inside the system, not just in someone’s head

• Can you show card and expense activity with the same clarity as invoices
  

If you can answer yes to these questions, audits become more predictable. Year-end is a good time to move closer to that point.

What year end often looks like in practice

From talking with Business Managers and school finance teams, the same patterns come up each year.

Audit room noise

You are answering emails, chat messages and phone calls, running reports and hunting for documents across systems.

• The AP team spends more time supporting the audit than processing

• Normal work slows down

• People work from different versions of the data
  

Gaps outside invoices

Invoices may be flowing through a clear AP pipeline. Card transactions and staff claims often are not.

• Credit card reconciliation is slow and mostly manual

• Sampling across cardholders or claim types takes time

• It is hard to show that controls are consistent across all spend
  

Evidence scattered across tools

Invoice images and backup documents might sit in Alii, your finance system, SharePoint and inboxes.

• People save different copies in different places

• Auditors ask “Where did this come from” and you have to trace it back

• Naming and folder structures vary by team

Awkward access for auditors

To keep moving, schools sometimes:

• Share generic logins

• Export large data sets and send them around

• Create temporary profiles that are hard to manage or lock down

This is uncomfortable from a governance and security point of view. It is also avoidable with the right AP set up.

This is uncomfortable from a governance and security perspective. When systems don’t connect, and people rely on manual workarounds, it becomes much harder to keep sensitive information contained or to show a reliable trail of who touched what. Under audit pressure, those gaps turn into real risk at the exact moment you need certainty. A more integrated AP environment keeps data in one secure place, applies controls consistently, and gives auditors clean, structured access, turning year-end from a scramble into a predictable, well-governed process.

All of this points to system design, not only process. That is where Alii can help.

1. Let auditors see what they need and change nothing

Auditors need a clear view of activity. Your team needs to protect data and workflows. The way to do both is to give auditors their own read only view.

In practice, that means:

• A dedicated Auditor profile with view only permissions

• The ability to see invoices, purchase orders and approvals across queues

• Full audit trails visible in one place

• No ability to edit, approve, cancel or post

Alii’s Auditor Access feature is built for this. You can give named auditors access so they can see everything they need, without the risk of changes inside the system.

Year-end tip

Decide what you want your typical auditor to see. Set up or review your Auditor profile now and test it with a sample invoice, rather than changing access mid audit.

2. Bring invoices, cards and expenses into one story

Auditors do not care which module a transaction ran through. They look at the whole pattern of spend.

They want to know:

• Was this purchase reasonable

• Was it approved by the right person

• Is it coded to the right place

• Can they see the receipt and any backup

It is hard to answer these questions if card and expense data lives outside your main system.

Alii brings these pieces together.

• With Credit Card Reconciliation, card transactions flow into Alii from your bank. You match receipts, assign spend to cardholders and code it to the right GL. The audit trail shows who did what and when.

• With Expense Management, staff submit claims online, attach receipts and send them for approval. Approvers see what they need in one place and Alii records the history.

For auditors, this means they can follow one story across invoices, cards and claims instead of dealing with three separate processes.

Year-end tip

List your main spend channels. Mark which ones already flow through Alii and which ones still rely on spreadsheets or email. That list will help you decide where card or expense modules will make the biggest difference next year.

3. Keep evidence where people actually look

For most schools, SharePoint is the default place for documents. If invoice backup ends up scattered in different folders or only inside email, everyone feels it at audit time.

When Alii is connected to SharePoint:

• Posted invoices can be exported into the right SharePoint library automatically

• Key details such as supplier, date, amount and codes arrive as columns

• You can search and filter in SharePoint to find what you need

The benefit is simple. When someone needs to see the invoice and supporting information, they know where to look.

Year-end tip

Pick a few invoices that have already been processed. Follow them from Alii into SharePoint and see where they land, how they are named and what information is carried across. Adjust your structure or integration if people still ask “Where did that invoice go”.

4. Make year-end behaviour predictable

A lot of year-end stress comes from system behaviour that is not obvious until it causes noise. This is where the themes from Alii’s End of Financial Year Checklist are useful as a general guide.

Important points to review include:

• Open purchase orders
  Decide which POs should stay open and roll into the new year and which should close so the commitment returns to the current budget.

• New GL financial year
  Create the new GL year in your finance system before the new period starts. Alii cannot post into a GL year that does not exist.

• Budgets
  If you sync budgets from your finance system into Alii, load the new year budgets before the year begins. If you do not, Alii will treat those budgets as zero and may trigger over-budget approvals for every transaction on those codes.

• Dashboard dates
  Update dashboard and report dates in Alii so people see the right period from the first day of the new year.

• Multi-year settings
  If you use multi-year budgets or exclude certain POs from the current budget, check those flags as you move into the new year. Make sure Include Dates and posting behaviour match the way you want commitments and invoices to behave.

For Alii customers, the Knowledge Base contains a detailed EOFY checklist that takes you through these items step by step. The same thinking applies even if you are not on Alii yet. You want your system to understand when one year ends and the next begins.

Year-end tip

Block a short session with finance and IT to walk through these settings together. Treat it as an annual health check for your AP environment, not just a list of jobs to tick off.

A short “system success” checklist

You can use this as a starting point for your own checklist.

1. Auditor access

• Set up or review a read only Auditor profile in your AP system

• Confirm what auditors can see in invoices, POs and approvals

• Test the profile with a real transaction

2. Spend channels

• List POs, invoices, cards and staff claims

• Note which flows are fully digital and which rely on spreadsheets or email

• Plan where card and expense modules or extra automation will help most

3. Evidence and SharePoint

• Confirm where posted invoices land in SharePoint

• Standardise folders and naming so staff and auditors know where to look

• Check that key invoice details come through as columns

4. Budgets and GL

• Create the new GL year in your finance system

• Load new year budgets and confirm they sync to Alii if budget sync is enabled

• Review any settings that control over budget approvals

5. Purchase orders and commitments

• Review open POs and decide which to roll forward and which to close

• Check the behaviour of POs excluded from the current budget and related invoices

6. Users and configuration

• Review who has admin and who has Auditor Access

• Clone or adjust profiles for new staff

• Keep a simple record of key settings so changes are easy to track

System success starts now, not on audit day

Year-end will never be quiet for school finance teams. But the way your systems behave is something you can influence well before the auditors arrive.

If you:

• Give auditors a clear read only view

• Bring invoices, cards and expenses into one story

• Make it easy to find evidence in SharePoint

• Keep budgets, POs and GL years behaving as expected
  

You lower the noise for both the audit and the new year that follows.

If you are already using Alii and want help working through your own EOFY checklist, your Customer Success Manager or our support team can guide you. If you are exploring AP automation and want to see how Alii supports this approach in practice, we are happy to walk you through it. Contact us here or book a demo with the team.