What is audit support schedules?
The supporting schedules an audit asks for, prepared from finished books.
An audit under Generally Accepted Auditing Standards runs on an engagement letter between your firm and your client, a PBC ("prepared by client") list issued at planning, and a fieldwork window where staff test what the client produced against what the ledger says. The PBC list is where most engagements lose time — it arrives as a folder of bank statements, GL exports, and loose documents, and someone still has to turn that into lead schedules a senior can actually open and tie to the trial balance. That conversion is our work: raw PBC items become indexed, tied-out schedules before your staff sit down with the file.
Calendar-year private companies cluster fieldwork into the same January–April window your firm is also running individual and corporate tax season, which is exactly why audit prep backs up. Nonprofits and governmental entities on a June 30 fiscal year push a second wave into the fall, often under Uniform Guidance single-audit requirements if they carry federal awards, or Government Auditing Standards (the Yellow Book) if a state or local grant agreement calls for it. Either calendar produces the same bottleneck: PBC items land, and a schedule has to exist before a tester can start.
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | Audit support schedules, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your CPA or enrolled agent | Everything that carries a licence in United States — rendered exactly as written: issue compilation, review or audit reports — those are restricted to licensed cpa firms. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
Audit support schedules in United States
Who the opinion belongs to
GAAS — the AU-C sections issued through the AICPA's Auditing Standards Board, or PCAOB standards for issuers — governs how the audit is performed, and the opinion is signed by a licensed CPA holding the engagement, on your firm's letterhead, under your firm's peer review coverage. We work inside the file your engagement team controls; the opinion, the risk assessment behind it, and the signature are never something we touch.
What a PBC list actually is, and why late items cost time
The PBC list is issued at planning and is due before fieldwork starts — it's the client's obligation, not the auditor's, and a late or partial PBC delivery is the single most common cause of a fieldwork window slipping. We track PBC items against the list as they arrive, flag what's missing while there's still runway to chase it, and turn each item into a schedule the moment it's usable instead of waiting for the folder to be complete.
External confirmations under AU-C 505
Bank, AR, and legal confirmations have to go directly to a third party and come back directly to the auditor — that's the standard's whole point, and it's why a confirmation can't be prepared by the client itself. We prepare the request against the population your team specifies, send it, and track responses against the follow-up schedule; a non-response past the second follow-up gets flagged to your team, who decide on alternative procedures.
Audit sampling under AU-C 530
Sample size and method — statistical or nonstatistical, and the tolerable misstatement behind it — is an engagement-team judgment call under AU-C 530, made in your firm's audit software. Once that selection exists, retrieving the actual population items behind each sampled number is mechanical, and that's the part we do: a tester opens the file and finds the invoice, not a placeholder.
What your CPA or enrolled agent receives from us
- Lead schedules for each trial balance line, tied to supporting detail and cross-referenced to your firm's indexing convention
- Bank, AR, and legal confirmation requests prepared against the specified population, sent, and tracked through follow-up rounds
- Sample-selection items retrieved and organized — invoices, purchase orders, shipping documents — matched to the sample list your engagement software generated
- PBC list items logged against the original request, with a running status of received, incomplete, and outstanding
- Fixed asset, debt, and equity rollforwards reconciled to the general ledger and prior-year workpapers
- Cutoff-testing support: transactions and supporting documents pulled for the period surrounding year-end
