Field notes · 26 June 2025

Preparing a Tbilisi finance team for the audit committee

The week before an audit committee in Tbilisi is often spent adding slides. That is the wrong instinct. The committee already has, or should have, the draft statements, the auditor’s open points, and an agenda. The work of the week is to make those three into one pack.

On Monday, freeze the draft you will actually table. If a lease number is still moving, write “moving” on that line rather than swapping pages on Thursday night. On Tuesday, sit with the open-points list and strike through what is closed, in ink the chair can see. On Wednesday, put the remaining points in agenda order, which is not always the auditor’s order. A going-concern sentence belongs higher than a classification debate even if the auditor listed them the other way.

Thursday is for the finance director’s rehearsal of the answers, out loud, with one other person in the room who is allowed to say when an answer wandered. Friday is for sending the pack. Members who receive papers on the morning of the sitting will not have read the related-party note, and they will say so, and the sitting will then perform that note badly.

None of this requires a new method. It requires that the company secretary and the reporting lead agree, by Monday, which watermarked draft is the draft. We have seen teams print two versions with the same cover. The committee noticed. The minutes did not record which one was approved. That is an oversight failure, not a printing failure.