What we learned from talking to 50+ auditors

Over the past few months, we have talked with more than 50 auditors, from small and boutique firms to teams inside the Big Four. We wanted to understand where the real friction is before deciding what to build. Three problems came up repeatedly. Here is what we heard and where we think we can help today versus where we are still working.

1. Capacity

It is still hard to find and keep good people, and firms feel it. The nuance that surprised us is that several auditors told us it has eased since the peak during COVID. So capacity is a genuine strain, but not the crisis it was a few years ago. It is the problem people name first, and it is fundamentally about staffing: finding good people, keeping them, and having enough of them to cover the work through a very uneven year.

2. Tool fragmentation

Firms have bought more tools than ever, but they do not talk to each other. An auditor pulls information into one tool, then re-enters much of the same information into the next. Each tool may save time on its own, but the friction between them eats into some of that. The net effect is that a set of individually useful tools ends up providing no or marginal benefits.

3. Context

This one showed up in two different forms. In mid-sized firms, context is lost as work moves between disconnected tools. At Big Four firms using AI, auditors told us the AI genuinely helps and guides them on documentation, but its guidance is too generic because it's not grounded in the industry or the specific client. In both cases, the missing ingredient is the same: the understanding of what this business does, where its risks sit, and what happened last year. That context is the heart of an audit, and it is the hardest thing to move between people and tools.

Where Snap fits today

We want to be straight about what Snap does and does not do right now. Snap helps most with the first problem, capacity. We take the mechanical side of testing off the auditor's plate, which gives them back hours.

Context is already part of how Snap works. We build the context of an engagement into our testing, so the outputs reflect this rather than generic results. Today, that context lives in three places: with the client, in the auditor's own experience, and in the firm's audit management software. Making it easier to bring that context in, so it carries across the workflow and compounds from one year to the next, is something we are actively improving.

The one problem we do not yet solve is tool fragmentation. Our plan is to connect more of the testing workflow inside Snap over time, so there are fewer handoffs between disconnected tools and less context lost between them.

We are learning from every one of these conversations. If you are wrestling with any of these three problems at your firm, we would be glad to compare notes.