Why does audit prep still feel like a scramble? | Payhawk

Audit season shouldn't feel like a scramble. But for most finance teams, it still does — and the reason has nothing to do with compliance standards.

In this Payhawk Digital Fireside, Gabriella Koenig (Director of Marketing, North America) sits down with Dan Osburn, Chief Payments Officer at Payhawk, to break down why audit preparation is still so painful — and what changes when the audit trail builds itself throughout the year.

Dan brings rare infrastructure depth to this conversation. Before Payhawk, he helped scale Marqeta from a $20M valuation to a $16B IPO, building the underlying systems that power modern card products. At Payhawk, he leads banking, cards, and compliance, and sits on the board of Payhawk's regulated entities in the UK and Lithuania.

What you'll learn:
1. Why audit prep becomes a scramble — and why it's a timing problem, not a compliance problem
2. Where the real work happens during audit preparation (it's not the compliance review)
3. Why reconstructing the context behind a transaction months later is so painful
4. What changes when receipts, approvals, and categorisation are captured the moment a card is used
5. Why replacing a corporate card program is one of the most disruptive decisions a finance team can make
6. How Payhawk Link & Control lets finance teams get real-time spend infrastructure without changing the card programs already embedded in their business

Key numbers from the conversation:
- Finance teams spend an average of 600+ hours per year on reconciliation
- Reconciliation consumes a full third of the accounting team's time
- Payhawk customers achieve 99.7% zero-touch ERP reconciliation
- Expense submissions happen twice as fast
- Approvals move over 60% faster
- Switching card programs typically takes 3–6 months and carries real operational risk

The big takeaway: audit chaos isn't about compliance. It's about timing.

When finance teams only see spend after the fact, they're forced to reconstruct the story behind transactions months later. When modern spend infrastructure captures context at the moment the card is used, the audit trail builds itself — and finance teams stay audit-ready year-round.

This is for: CFOs, Finance Directors, Financial Controllers, AP Managers, and finance leaders evaluating modern spend management without the disruption of replacing their card programme.

Find out more:

🔗 Payhawk website: https://payhawk.com
🔗 Payhawk Link and Control: https://payhawk.com/en-us/corporate-card-management
🔗 AI agents overview: https://payhawk.com/en-us/platform/ai-agents

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