The audit a human team can’t keep up with.
A fully automated audit platform that reviews data and documentation against the DfE funding rules and DfE Audit Working Papers, learner by learner, continuously. The annual £50k–£100k audit task, done by the platform.
Almost every provider runs an internal audit at least once a year.
External auditors charge £5k–£50k per cycle for the work manually. Internally, an audit takes 2–4 hours per learner. For a provider with 1,000 learners, that’s over a year of full-time work and roughly two FTE auditors at salary plus on-costs of ~£100k per year to do one annual audit pass. The Audit Centre does that audit continuously, on every learner, against the same funding rules and DfE Audit Working Papers a human would test.
The full audit, automated.
Every learner, every funding rule, every working paper. Data and documentation reviewed the way an auditor would, then surfaced as actionable findings with rule references.
Audit against funding rules
Every learner audited against the current apprenticeship funding rules. Findings categorised into Over-claimed, Under-claimed, Ineligible activity, Missing evidence with severity and rule reference.
Audit against DfE Audit Working Papers
The same set of working papers an external auditor would test against. The platform runs every test on every learner. The output is the auditor’s working file, generated for you.
Reviews data AND documentation
Not just ILR data. The platform inspects supporting documentation: training plan signatures, commitment statements, eligibility evidence, OTJH records. Findings reference the document, not just the field.
Continuous, not annual
Schedule audit runs daily, weekly or monthly. Compliance breaks surface when you create them, not at year-end. The annual audit becomes a confirmation, not a discovery.
Per-learner risk scoring
Every learner scored 0–100 with risk band (Critical / High / Medium / Low). High-risk learners surface first so remediation effort goes where it matters.
Audit credits and streams
Scope an audit run by Standard, cohort or funding type. Credit-based usage with a transaction ledger so finance teams can attribute audit cost to programme.
Compliance and earnings, alongside the audit.
The Audit Centre also includes PDSAT for ongoing compliance validation and FIS for per-learner earnings projection. All three sub-modules share the same data and link to each other on the per-learner detail.
PDSAT compliance dashboard
Real-time data validation against 50+ DfE compliance rules. Pass / Fail / Warning per learner, risk distribution, 11 issue categories from data quality through to gateway and completion.
FIS earnings projections
Per-learner monthly earnings forecast across funding models (FM36 / 35 / 38 / 37). Covers on-programme, completion, balancing, incentives and learning support.
PDSAT linked to FIS
PDSAT risk score sits next to earnings forecast on the FIS learner detail. A learner forecasting low earnings with a Critical PDSAT flag is one click from investigation.
Related capabilities
Delivery Management: the full deep-dive.
20-page PDF covering the Audit Centre add-on alongside trackers, Quality Reviews, Sampling, IQA and Training.
Download the deep-diveReplace the £50k+ annual audit pain.
Book a demo and we’ll run a sample audit on a real tenant. Thirty minutes, no prep needed your end. You’ll see findings categorised, working papers tracked, and the evidence trail in one place.
Book Your DemoFrequently asked questions
- What are the DfE Audit Working Papers?
- The Audit Working Papers set out the tests the Department for Education and its auditors apply when checking that funded delivery complies with the funding rules. They define what evidence must exist per learner and what constitutes a valid claim, which is why they are the right basis for an internal audit rather than a generic checklist.
- What is PDSAT?
- PDSAT (Provider Data Self-Assessment Toolkit) is the DfE toolkit providers use to interrogate their own ILR data for anomalies and potential funding errors before submission or audit. It highlights patterns that commonly indicate compliance risk.
- What is FIS?
- FIS (Funding Information System) is the DfE tool that calculates expected earnings from submitted ILR data. Comparing FIS projections against your own expectations is how funding discrepancies are usually detected.
- Does the audit check documentation as well as data?
- Yes. The Audit Centre reviews both the per-learner data and the supporting documentation, because most funding findings arise from evidence that is missing or inconsistent rather than from figures that are arithmetically wrong.
- Does this replace an external funding audit?
- No. It gives you continuous internal assurance so that issues are found and corrected long before an external audit, rather than replacing your statutory audit obligations.