Client stories
Specific feedback from finance and credit leaders who commissioned collections-focused financial audit work.
Voices from recent engagements
“The aging roll-forward exposed a branch that was still booking recoveries to a closed cost center. It was an awkward finding for our team, but it stopped a month-end debate that had lasted three closes.”
“Their recovery process assessment spent real time on our agency instruction letters. We had assumed the templates were enough; the sample showed half the placed accounts lacked an updated balance figure. Not flattering — and exactly what we needed before renegotiating the agency fee.”
“We only wanted a write-off policy review before the credit committee. The letter was short, which the board appreciated, though I wish the sample had included more SME accounts — our consumer book looked cleaner than the rest of the portfolio.”
Extended story: remittance lag before year-end
A consumer finance client asked for a collections financial audit four weeks before year-end. Scope covered one legal entity and two external agencies. Fieldwork found that agency remittances posted in the first five business days of the new month were still tagged to the prior month in the recovery desk’s tracker, while cash books used bank-clearing dates. The misalignment inflated “pending remittance” by a material amount relative to the allowance debate underway.
Management cleared the factual draft in two rounds. The final pack recommended a single cut-off rule owned by finance, with the recovery desk reconciling to that rule rather than maintaining a parallel calendar. The client reported the adjustment before external auditors arrived; we were not the statutory auditor on that engagement.
Extended story: promise-to-pay without ledger support
During a recovery process assessment, sample accounts showed frequent promise-to-pay notes that never changed the contractual due date in the ledger. Supervisors treated the notes as performance evidence; finance treated arrears as unchanged. The assessment did not declare one side “wrong”; it documented the dual meaning and asked the credit committee to pick a single definition for reporting and incentive purposes.