Why this matters now
Over the last six months we interviewed twelve accountants whose clients had sat through a recent RRA audit. We wanted to know what auditors actually ask — not the general spirit of an audit, but the literal questions that come across the desk, in order, in the language they use.
We talked to accountants working with distributors in Kigali, wholesalers in Musanze, importers in Rubavu, and a food manufacturer in Huye. Businesses ranging from three employees to fifty-two. The audits they described happened between October 2024 and February 2026. We didn’t want a theory of compliance. We wanted the transcript.
The good news: the list is short. Six questions, in the same order, nearly every time. The better news: each one has a clean, specific answer if your books are in order. The bad news: if they aren’t, the questions arrive faster than you can assemble a response — and a tired auditor reads “I need to get back to you on that” as a problem, not a delay.
Question 1 — “Show me all sales for this quarter”
Every audit we heard about opened here. The auditor asks for a complete sales list for the period under review — a quarter, sometimes a full year — exported as a CSV or PDF. They want invoice number, issue date, customer, line items, VAT treatment per line, and the total.
That sounds obvious, but it’s a surprisingly good test. If your invoices live across a WhatsApp thread, a paper pad, and three inconsistent spreadsheets, just producing the list takes two days — before you’ve answered a single question about what’s on it. If your invoices live in a ledger with a one-click export, you’re done before the auditor finishes their coffee.
Our accountants consistently said the same thing: the first 30 minutes of an audit set the tone for the next week. An auditor who receives a clean, sortable export in the requested format treats the rest of the conversation as collaborative. One who waits three hours while you piece together a register treats the rest as investigative.
Question 2 — “Who edited this invoice?”
This one usually lands after the auditor spots a correction. A voided invoice, a reissued credit note, an amount adjustment between the original issue date and today. They want to see the chain of custody: who made the change, when, from which device, and what the value was before versus after.
The point isn’t to catch you in something. It’s to establish that your system can produce the chain at all. An audit trail with before-values and after-values is how you demonstrate that corrections happen on the record — not under it.
An append-only audit log with actor, timestamp, before-value, and after-value resolves this question in seconds. Auditors don’t expect a perfect history — they expect an honest one. A system that says “we don’t know who edited that” is more alarming than a system that says “it was Jean, on March 2nd, because the customer called with a corrected PO.”
Question 3 — “Prove VAT was collected”
The auditor picks one invoice — usually a large one, occasionally a random sample — and asks you to walk it through end to end. Billed to whom, VAT computed how, the VAT line broken out, paid when, posted to which accounts, reflected in the next VAT return.
The question is less about the individual invoice than whether your process produces the same answer twice. If you can trace RWF 1,338,120 on an invoice to a matching line on the VAT summary, to a reconciled payment, to a journal entry in the general ledger — all consistent, all timestamped — the auditor has seen enough of your process to trust the rest of it.
What goes wrong here
The most common failure isn’t fraud or incompetence. It’s manual edits to the invoice after issue, without a matching correction on the VAT side. A sales rep fixes a typo on a PDF and reissues. The invoice total changes. The VAT line stays as originally calculated. Two weeks later nobody remembers the edit, and the numbers don’t tie.
Question 4 — “List all voided invoices”
Voids are where fraud hides, so auditors look here. A handful of voided invoices in a quarter is normal. Everyone makes mistakes. A void rate above roughly 2% of issued invoices draws questions — not accusations, but questions.
The best defense is a clean reason code per void: wrong amount, duplicate, customer cancellation, damaged goods, pricing error. Five codes, consistently applied. Auditors don’t need a novel; they need a pattern they can verify. If 38 voids in Q3 all carry a reason code and a timestamp, an auditor moves on. If 38 voids are unlabeled, an auditor camps out.
The void list is a story. Auditors aren’t trying to read between the lines — they’re trying to read the lines. Make sure you’ve written them.— Aline Uwimana, Senior Accountant, Gikondo Distributors
Question 5 — “What was inventory value on this date?”
Balance-sheet auditors want a point-in-time valuation. Not what you had in stock today. What you had on December 31 at midnight. The difference between those two numbers is usually where the problems show up.
If you use weighted-average costing, they want the method documented and the costing logic consistent across the period. If you use FIFO, they want the ageing report alongside — so the oldest batches of a given SKU are visibly consumed first. If you use some improvised hybrid, they want to know why, and when the method was last changed.
The trap most wholesalers fall into
Switching costing methods mid-period without documenting the switch. It happens for good reasons — a new ERP, a change in supplier structure, a partner buyout. But if the method changes without an audit event, the before-and-after numbers can’t be reconciled, and the auditor has to assume the worst-case version of both.
Question 6 — “Show me the locked period”
This is the quiet final question. By the time it arrives, the auditor already has most of what they need. They want to confirm one last thing: that your accounting system locks periods on close, and that reopening a closed period requires a reason — written down.
A period that anyone can edit retroactively is a red flag even when the underlying numbers are correct. Not because the retroactive edit happened, but because the auditor can’t prove it didn’t. A system with tamper-evident period locks, even ones that get reopened occasionally, is vastly preferable to a system with permissive periods that nobody happens to have edited recently.
The pattern behind these questions
If you read the six questions together, a pattern emerges. The auditor isn’t looking for brilliance. They’re looking for consistency. Can you produce the same answer twice? Can your tools show you the chain from a single invoice to the general ledger to the VAT return without a manual reconstruction? Does your process survive the person who set it up leaving?
The questions aren’t a test of your software. They’re a test of whether your software makes the answers easy.
This is why tools matter. Not because software is magic — it isn’t — but because software is the cheapest way to produce consistency at scale. A human can answer all six questions from memory for a ten-customer business. At fifty customers, nobody can. The tool becomes the memory.
It’s also why we resist the “paperless office” framing. An auditor doesn’t care whether your invoices are paper or digital. They care whether the same invoice, pulled two different ways, gives the same number. Paper can do that. Digital can do that. What neither can do is compensate for inconsistent process.
What to do this week
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking about one of two things. Either you have an audit coming and you want to prepare, or you don’t have one pending but you’d like to stop dreading it. Both are the same problem and both have the same starter move.
- Export your full sales register for the last quarter. If it takes more than ten minutes, that’s where to invest your next week.
- Pull your void list for the last year. Count unlabeled voids. If any of them are unlabeled, label them today — with whoever remembers the reason.
- Confirm your costing method is documented somewhere your accountant can find without calling you.
- Close and lock your most recent completed month, even if you close a day late. Practice the lock before you need it.
Four tasks. Half a day. The audit that shows up six months from now will be a different conversation than the one that showed up today.
Our own tool — GwizaSuite — is built around answering these six questions in one click each. We built it because one of us watched his mother spend three days reconstructing a single quarter for an RRA audit, and decided no Rwandan business should have to. If you’re curious, start a trial. If you’d rather do this in Excel, the four tasks above work there too.