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Good accounting systems leave good audit trails. An audit trail is a clear-cut, well-marked path of the sequence of events leading up to an entry in the accounts, starting with the source documents and following through to the final posting in the accounts; an auditor can “re-walk” the path. Even if a business doesn’t have an outside CPA do an annual audit, the accountant has frequent occasion to go back to the source documents and either verify certain information in the accounts or reconstruct the information in a different manner. Suppose that a salesperson is claiming some suspicious-looking travel expenses; the accountant would probably want to go through all of this person’s travel and entertainment reimbursements for the past year.

If the IRS comes in for a field audit of your income tax return, you’d better have good audit trails to substantiate all your expense deductions and sales revenue for the year. The IRS has rules about saving source documents for a reasonable period of time and having a well-defined process for making bookkeeping entries and keeping accounts. Think twice before throwing away or deleting source documents too soon. Also, ask your accountant to demonstrate and lay out for your inspection the audit trails for key transactions, such as cash collections, sales, cash disbursements, and inventory purchases. Even computer-based accounting systems recognize the importance of audit trails. Well-designed computer programs provide the ability to backtrack through the sequence of steps in the recording of specific transactions.