Produce Your Records for a State Audit

An auditor named a period that reaches back years, and every transaction in it is already in your backups. This is how to get them out and into the auditor's hands.

Introduction

Audit requests don't arrive as a list of deals. They arrive as a stretch of time: everything from January 2020 to now, every transaction closed in a given period. Often they also demand proof of when things happened, not just that they exist. That's a different job from pulling a file for an agent, and it's usually a much bigger one.

Your monthly backups are built for exactly this. Each one is a complete, organized copy of a month's transactions, including the activity log an auditor actually wants to see. This walks you through scoping the request, assembling the months it covers, pulling out just what was asked for, and handing it over.

When to Use This

• Your state real estate commission is auditing you and wants every transaction over a range of years.
• The auditor wants proof of when each document was submitted and when it was reviewed, not just the documents.
• You can only download a handful of transactions a day and the audit covers hundreds.
• The audit reaches back into months that are long past the 30-day backup window.
• You're being audited on records from an account you already closed.

Why This Beats Downloading Them One at a Time

The obvious move is to work down the auditor's range in the account, downloading transactions one by one. It works right up until it doesn't. Preparing a transaction for download takes real work on our servers, so there's a limit on how many an account can download in a day — and it moves with server load and your plan, so nobody can tell you in advance what today's number is. An audit spanning years finds that ceiling on the first afternoon.

The backups don't have that problem, because Pipeline already did the work at the close of each month. A backup is one file per month holding everything that happened in it, already sorted, already complete. Pulling six months of history out of six archives takes an afternoon; grinding the same range through on-demand downloads can take weeks of hitting a daily wall.

1. Pin Down What the Audit Actually Covers

Before you assemble anything, get the request in writing and get it precise. Auditors ask in different currencies — a date range, a list of addresses, "every closing in 2024," sometimes a specific document type across a period. What you need out of that conversation is a start date, an end date, and whether they want whole transaction files or particular documents.

Then turn the range into a real list. Searching your transactions by the date they were added, over the auditor's range, gives you the actual set you're producing and a count you can plan around — and it tells you immediately whether this is a twenty-transaction job or a six-hundred-transaction job.

Narrow the Transactions page to exactly the deals you need — search by name, filter by any field, sort the result, and download it.

See Transaction Search

2. Gather the Months the Audit Reaches

Work out which monthly backups cover the auditor's range, then see how many of them you already have. Each month's backup is only downloadable for 30 days, so recent months may still be waiting in your account while older ones are either on your drive already or not yet in hand.

For the months you're missing, our Tech Team can re-generate them. There's a fee based on how many months of data you need, and we'll quote it once you send the months and years — your master admin makes the request. Send the whole range in one order rather than a few at a time; it's faster and it lets us look at the request as a whole.

Every month, Pipeline builds a downloadable copy of your account so you always have an offline record of your transactions and documents — yours to keep, whether you're just being cautious or planning ahead.

See Monthly Backups

3. Pull Out Just the Transactions the Auditor Named

Now open the archives and take out what the auditor asked for. Inside each monthly ZIP, transactions are in folders named by property address, so you're matching against the list from step 1 rather than hunting. Copy the folders you need into a working folder for the audit and leave the rest of the archive alone.

Each folder already holds the whole story of that deal: the documents in their original format, plus the notes, emails, checklists, and the activity log — all as plain text that opens on any computer, with no Pipeline login needed at either end. That activity log is usually the part the audit turns on, because it's what shows when each document was uploaded, emailed, assigned, commented on, reviewed, or deleted. It's the evidence that things happened when you say they happened.

4. Hand the Records Over

What you've assembled is ordinary files in ordinary folders, so send them however your auditor prefers to receive them — email if it's small, a shared drive or file-transfer service if it isn't. Audit sets get large quickly, and a link usually beats an attachment.

Send your list from step 1 alongside the files. It turns a folder of addresses into a produced record: here is the range you asked for, here is what existed in it, here is each one. If the auditor comes back for a second range later, you'll be glad the first one is documented.