Finance & FP&A

How to prepare audit and tax workpapers as Small Legal and Compliance Teams

Finance & FP&AFor Small Legal and Compliance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your two-person legal team is the last stop before the auditors arrive, and you're pulling workpapers together from four different places at once. The auditor wants a schedule of all vendor contracts signed in the last 12 months — that's 45 minutes hunting through a Google Drive folder that nobody's organized since Q2. The tax CPA needs a summary of accrued legal expenses by entity, which means you're cross-referencing Gmail threads with QuickBooks exports you don't have direct access to. Meanwhile you have zero visibility into which bank transactions relate to outside counsel vs. regulatory filings vs. settlement payments. You're not an accountant, but during audit season you become one by default.

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Finance & FP&AFor Small Legal and Compliance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A living contract schedule that auto-populates vendor name, execution date, term, and counterparty from your Google Drive and Gmail — ready to hand to auditors without a manual build

A legal-spend tracker that pulls categorized transactions from your connected bank accounts and flags any new outside counsel or regulatory payment that appeared in the audit period

An audit-request queue that logs every PBC (Provided by Client) item, assigns it an owner, and tracks completion status — so you stop managing auditor requests through a shared inbox

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Transaction Insights Knowledge Management Contract Lifecycle Management

Data sources & config

Transaction Insights is powered by Starch's direct connection to Plaid — your bank account transactions sync on a schedule so the spending data is always current. The contract tracker and knowledge management surfaces connect to Google Drive and Gmail through Starch's integration catalog, queried live when the app runs. Slack notifications go out through Starch's integration catalog connection to Slack. Any vendor portal or regulatory filing site that doesn't have an API — say, pulling a state bar invoice or a county court filing confirmation — Starch automates through your browser with no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a legal spend dashboard that pulls all transactions from my connected bank accounts, categorizes them by vendor (outside counsel, regulatory fees, settlement payments, court filings), and flags any payment over $5,000 that appeared in the last 12 months. Show month-by-month totals and let me export a schedule formatted for auditors.

Build me a contract workpaper tracker that shows every vendor agreement in our Google Drive folder, with columns for vendor name, execution date, contract value, renewal date, and signatory. Let me add audit notes inline and mark each row as 'provided to auditor' when done.

Build me a PBC request manager where I can paste in the auditor's request list, assign each item to a team member, set a due date, and track whether the document has been uploaded or the question has been answered. Send me a Slack summary every morning showing which items are overdue.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your business bank accounts through Plaid — Starch syncs transactions on a schedule, categorized and timestamped, covering the full audit period (typically 12–14 months back).

2 Connect Google Drive from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query your contracts folder live. Tell Starch: 'Find every executed agreement in our /Legal/Contracts folder signed between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025 and build a schedule with vendor name, date, and contract value.'

3 Connect Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync so email threads — engagement letters, outside counsel invoices, settlement correspondence — are reachable as part of your workpaper surface.

4 Use the Transaction Insights starter app to build a legal spend schedule. Customize it to tag transactions by your own categories: outside counsel, regulatory filings, settlement payments, notary and filing fees.

5 Flag anomalies: ask Starch to surface any payment to a legal vendor that doesn't appear in your contract schedule — these are the items auditors always find first.

6 Build the PBC tracker app by telling Starch: 'Create a request management board where I can paste audit requests, assign an owner, set a deadline, and log the document or answer that satisfies each item. Mark items closed when the auditor confirms receipt.'

7 Wire a daily Slack digest through Starch's integration catalog connection to Slack: 'Every morning at 8am, send me a message listing all open PBC items, their assigned owner, and whether they're past due.'

8 For any vendor portal that only lives in a browser — a state bar payment portal, a court e-filing system, a regulatory fee receipt — tell Starch to automate retrieval through your browser: 'Log into the Illinois ARDC portal and download all fee receipts from 2025 as PDFs.'

9 Pull the accrued legal expenses summary by asking Starch to cross-reference your Plaid transaction data against the contract schedule: 'Show me all legal spend in Q4 2025 broken down by vendor, and flag any vendor I paid but don't have an executed agreement on file for.'

10 Export audit-ready schedules directly from your Starch app in the format your CPA or auditor requested — a dated snapshot your team can stand behind.

11 After fieldwork closes, use the Knowledge Management app to archive the final workpaper set, the auditor's signed-off PBC list, and any open items carried forward — so next year's audit starts from a clean baseline instead of a dead Google Drive folder.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

FY2025 Annual Audit — Legal Workpaper Sprint, February 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Outside counsel — employment matters (Feldman & Associates)	48,200
Outside counsel — commercial contracts review (ad hoc)	12,750
Regulatory filing fees — Delaware franchise tax + registered agent	3,100
Settlement payment — former vendor dispute	22,000
Notary, apostille, and court filing fees (misc)	1,640
Legal software subscriptions (DocuSign, Vanta)	8,400

Your external auditor sends a PBC list on February 3rd with 22 line items due by February 14th. The first thing they want is a complete schedule of legal spend for FY2025 — $96,090 across six categories. Starch's Plaid connection had already synced all 12 months of transactions, so you open the legal spend dashboard and it's already there, categorized. You spot the $22,000 settlement payment immediately — Starch flagged it as anomalous in November when it hit, because your typical monthly legal spend is under $8,000. You add a note directly in the Starch app: 'Covered by NDA; auditor notified separately.' The contract schedule takes 12 minutes instead of 45: Starch queries your Google Drive contracts folder live, pulls the 31 vendor agreements executed in 2025, and builds the schedule. You notice Feldman & Associates has three separate engagement letters — you had only remembered two — which explains $6,200 you hadn't mapped correctly. The PBC tracker keeps the remaining 19 items visible every morning in Slack, and on February 12th you close the last open item two days early.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to deliver complete PBC package after auditor kickoff (target: under 10 business days)

Number of audit findings or open items carried forward to management letter (target: zero legal-operations items)

Percentage of legal spend transactions mapped to an executed agreement or approved PO (target: 100% for audit period)

Time to build the annual contract schedule from zero (current baseline vs. Starch-assisted)

Number of regulatory deadlines or renewal dates missed in the audit period (target: zero)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Ironclad or LinkSquares

Full CLM with structured clause extraction and workflow automation, but six-figure contracts and a dedicated legal-ops admin to run it — not built for a two-person team also doing everything else.

Google Drive folder + manual spreadsheet

Free and already in place, but the contract schedule is always stale, there's no spend visibility, and audit prep is a four-day manual rebuild every year.

QuickBooks reports pulled by your CFO

Gets you categorized spend, but you don't control the timing or the categories, and it won't cross-reference against your contract file or surface the 'paid but no agreement on file' gap.

Vanta or Drata (compliance platform)

Excellent for policy attestation and SOC 2 evidence collection, but not built to produce financial audit workpapers or legal spend schedules — you still need something else for those.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, knowledge management, contract lifecycle management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch store my bank transaction data, or is it querying live every time?

Starch syncs your Plaid-connected bank data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database. That means your audit-period transactions are available instantly without hitting the bank API every time you open the dashboard. It also means you can run historical queries across the full audit period without rate-limit issues.

We use QuickBooks for our books. Can Starch pull legal expense data from there instead of or in addition to Plaid?

Yes — Starch connects directly to QuickBooks and syncs entity-level data including bills, invoices, vendors, and payments on a schedule. One caveat: QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but the underlying entity data syncs normally. For audit workpapers, that entity-level data is typically what you need anyway.

Our auditors want workpapers in a specific Excel format. Can Starch export to that?

Starch apps let you export data from any surface you build. If your auditor has a specific template, tell Starch what columns and format they need when you're building the app — 'export this contract schedule as a CSV with columns for vendor, date, value, term, and signatory in that order' — and it'll build to that spec.

We don't have all our contracts in Google Drive — some are in DocuSign and some are in people's email. Can Starch pull from those?

DocuSign is reachable from Starch's integration catalog, so the agent can query it live when your contract tracker runs. Gmail syncs on a schedule through Starch's direct connection, so executed agreements sent as email attachments are also reachable. If contracts live in a portal that has no API, Starch can retrieve them through browser automation — no API needed.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Our auditors may ask about data handling for the tools we use.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your auditors require SOC 2 Type II certification for every tool that touches financial or contract data, that's worth knowing upfront. For teams where that's not a hard requirement, Starch handles data in transit and at rest with standard encryption, but we won't claim a certification we don't have.

The Contract Lifecycle Management app listed on your site — is that available now?

Contract Lifecycle Management is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, you can build a contract tracker app from scratch by describing it to Starch — 'build me a contract schedule that pulls from Google Drive and Gmail, with columns for vendor, execution date, renewal date, and signatory' — and it works today using your existing connections.

We're a two-person team. Is this going to take a week to set up?

The setup is connecting your data sources (Plaid takes a few minutes through Starch's guided flow; Google Drive and Gmail connect from the integration catalog) and then describing what you want. Most teams have a working legal spend dashboard and contract tracker inside an afternoon. The audit-request queue is another hour once you have your first PBC list in hand.