Answering Audit Fieldwork Requests in Hours, Not Days

An auditor’s fieldwork request rarely arrives as one big ask. It arrives as a drip: support this revenue figure, explain that variance, show the source document behind this balance. Each one is small on its own. Add them up over a two-week fieldwork window and a finance team can spend more time retrieving evidence than the audit itself takes to review it. The usual bottleneck isn’t the auditor being slow. It’s that the evidence lives in someone’s inbox, a shared drive, or a PDF nobody has opened since it was filed, and finding it again takes longer than anyone expects.

What normally eats the time

A request for “support for the AED 4.9 million revenue line” typically means someone on your team has to remember which filing it came from, open the right document, find the right page, screenshot or annotate it, and email it back with enough context that the auditor doesn’t ask a follow-up. Do that a dozen times a week during fieldwork and you’ve effectively assigned someone to be a full-time evidence courier. None of that work is analysis. It’s retrieval, and retrieval shouldn’t take days.

A link that lets the auditor self-serve

Rexfin’s approach is to give the auditor a scoped, read-only share link into the actual workspace rather than a folder of exports. The auditor opens a tokenized URL (no login provisioning, nothing for you to set up beyond creating the link) and sees the same cited statements and figures your team works from. When they want support for a number, they click it directly. A drawer opens showing the figure’s full chain of evidence: the source PDF page, rendered inline rather than described in a caption, with the cited figure ringed on the actual page and a badge confirming the file’s bytes were re-verified against the same hash the audit trail already has on record. The auditor is looking at the real page you filed, not a claim about it.

Only figures that are actually booked (real, sourced transactions) carry this click-to-source behavior. A forecasted or modelled cell has no such affordance, because there’s no source document behind it to click to. That distinction matters during fieldwork: an auditor testing for support isn’t left guessing whether a number is supposed to have evidence behind it. If it’s clickable, it’s sourced. If it isn’t, it never claimed to be.

Visibility without a second meeting

Every time the link is opened, the view is logged per section with a timestamp. That gives your team a running picture of what’s actually been reviewed, without a status-check email to the audit team asking what they’ve looked at so far. It also means fieldwork stops being a black box on your end: you know which figures have already been examined and which ones are still likely to generate a follow-up question.

When the engagement wraps, the link revokes cleanly and immediately. A revoked, expired, or simply invalid token all resolve to the same plain “not found” on the outside, so there’s no way for anyone still holding an old link to learn whether it used to work. That precision lives only in your own panel, never in what the link reveals to whoever opens it.

The honest limit

Worth stating plainly: today, possessing the link is the access. There’s no separate identity check layered underneath it, so the link deserves the same handling as a password: set an expiry where the engagement allows it, and treat revoke as a routine close-out step once fieldwork ends, not something you only remember to do if asked. This is meant for a defined, time-boxed engagement with a known counterparty, not as a permanent open door into your numbers.

Who this actually helps

This is built for the finance team facing its annual or interim audit and tired of playing evidence courier, for a controller onboarding a new external auditor who’s asking for more support than the prior firm did, and for any team going through year-end close who would rather point auditors at a live, cited view than assemble a working paper that then needs its own version control. It pairs naturally with a broader audit preparation process, and it’s the same mechanism a monthly close walkthrough or a board reporting cycle leans on when the pack needs to survive a hard question from someone outside your team.

For more on how finance teams handle the moments where numbers get tested, visit the finance team use cases hub, or book a demo to see a fieldwork request answered live, drawer and all.