AuditSight: Streamlining Audits & Eliminating Back-and-Forth

The Challenges of Traditional Financial Audits

Financial statement audits are a crucial component of business operations, yet they frequently present complexities. The process often involves extensive documentation collection, frequently necessitating repeated email exchanges between the auditor and the company to secure necessary files and information.

T.C. Whittaker, the co-founder and CEO of Audit Sight, points out that organizations can allocate substantial financial resources – potentially millions of dollars annually – to these audits. However, the overall client experience often falls short of expectations.

Whittaker recounts his personal experience performing audit work in a confined, windowless environment while employed at PwC. His tasks involved manually inputting data into spreadsheets, a process he described as particularly arduous.

Audit Sight's Innovative Approach

“The process was genuinely difficult,” he shared with TechCrunch. “Clients are required to present comprehensive details, from which auditors select specific items for review, leading to a protracted back-and-forth exchange. Even then, I recognized the need for a more efficient methodology.”

This realization prompted Whittaker and co-founder Jonathan Womack to initially develop a system within PwC centered around cloud-based audit workflows. Subsequently, they departed PwC last year to establish Audit Sight, an Atlanta-based company designed to eliminate this iterative exchange.

Audit Sight achieves this by leveraging APIs to directly access client records and by enabling the examination of 100% of transactions, rather than relying on sampling.

Securing Seed Funding for Expansion

To facilitate continued software development, the company announced on Friday a $2.5 million seed funding round. Hyde Park Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from Alumni Ventures Group and several individual investors.

These investors include Johnson Cook and Tim Sheehan, co-founders of Greenlight; Aaron Rankin, co-founder of Sprout Social; and John Seybold and Ken Branson, co-founders of Guidewire Software.

Whittaker emphasizes that the audit services sector is projected to be a $43 billion market in the United States this year. The new funding will allow the company to expand its team to meet this growing demand.

Recent additions to the team include Eric Kingery, appointed as chief technology officer, and Attila Domokos, who joined as executive vice president of engineering.

Future Development and Market Impact

The company plans to develop a suite of SaaS applications, with the first two modules – focusing on revenue and accounts receivables – scheduled for release by the year's end. Audit Sight currently has customers piloting the software.

“Our immediate focus is on deploying this solution to paying customers,” Whittaker stated. “Audits are fundamentally beneficial, fostering trust in corporate performance. They also play a vital role in lending decisions made by financial institutions. We are pioneering greater transparency within this domain.”

As part of the investment agreement, Ira Weiss, a partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners, has joined the Audit Sight board. Weiss had prior familiarity with the company’s team during their tenure at PwC and personally understood the challenges of the audit process from his own brief experience as an auditor.

His firm prioritizes investments in companies addressing substantial market opportunities by solving previously intractable problems. This was made possible by the relatively recent shift of accounting systems to the cloud.

Weiss was particularly drawn to the investment due to the backgrounds and prior experience of Whittaker and Womack in both accounting and software development.

“I envision a future where audits can be completed swiftly and effortlessly,” he added. “Imagine contacting your audit firm and receiving a preliminary audit assessment in under a week, potentially even instantaneously within the next few decades.”