If you’ve got a SOC 1 audit coming up, congratulations—you’re officially about to have strangers poke around your systems, policies, and procedures to make sure you’re doing what you say you’re doing.
Sounds fun, right?
In reality, SOC 1 compliance is a rite of passage for service organizations that handle financial reporting data for their clients. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be a nightmare. With the right preparation, you can go into the audit calm, collected, and ready to impress.
Whether you’re facing a Type I (a point-in-time check) or Type II (operating effectiveness over a period of time) audit, the preparation steps are largely the same, you just have to think ahead, be organized, and keep your evidence airtight.
This is your SOC 1 readiness pre-flight checklist, Black Swamp style.
Understand Your Scope
You can’t protect what you don’t know, and you can’t audit what you haven’t scoped.
- Identify systems and processes in scope. If it touches client financial reporting, it’s probably in scope.
- Map out services and subservice providers. Know where your control stops and theirs starts.
- Pro tip: Scope creep is real, if you don’t nail it down early, you’ll be scrambling later.
Inventory Your Controls
Think of this as your “what we say we do” list.
- Gather every policy, procedure, and control doc you’ve got, access, change management, incident response, backup and recovery.
- Assign control owners and make sure they actually understand their responsibilities.
- Compare your controls against the SOC 1 control objectives, you don’t want any gaps the auditor will spot in 30 seconds.
Lock in Your Evidence
In SOC 1 land, if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.
- Pull together screenshots, logs, tickets, reports—anything that proves you ran the control.
- Keep timestamps and the name of the person responsible.
- Store everything in one secure, organized place—bonus points for a well-labeled SharePoint or compliance platform folder structure.
Review Access Controls
This is one of the most common SOC 1 issues, don’t let it be yours.
- Make sure role-based access control (RBAC) is enforced.
- Review your user access recertification process, is it documented? Is it followed?
- Disable stale accounts immediately and log the action.
- Audit your provisioning/deprovisioning process, your auditors will.
Test Before the Test
A mock SOC 1 audit is like a dress rehearsal before opening night.
- Walk through each control with your team, can they explain it without a script?
- Conduct internal mock interviews so SMEs don’t freeze under pressure.
- Use internal audit tools to check if your evidence passes the “auditor sniff test.”
Tighten Vendor Management
If you outsource part of your process, you’re still on the hook.
- Collect and review your vendors’ SOC reports.
- Document due diligence and ongoing monitoring activities.
- Understand complementary user entity controls (CUECs), auditors will expect you to implement them.
Update Policies and Procedures
Old policies are like milk—fine one day, curdled the next.
- Make sure every policy is current, approved, and communicated.
- Procedures should reflect actual practice, auditors can smell a “paper-only control” a mile away.
- Keep a version history to show ongoing maintenance.
Train Your People
Your controls are only as strong as the people running them.
- Brief your team on audit scope, timelines, and expectations.
- Give SMEs enough background to explain the “why” behind their processes.
- Reinforce that this isn’t a pop quiz, it’s a chance to prove your organization’s reliability.
Schedule and Plan Audit Logistics
If you leave scheduling to chance, you’ll have chaos.
- Book auditor access to systems and documentation in advance.
- Schedule SME interviews early and avoid peak workload times.
- Build a detailed audit calendar so everyone knows when their moment is coming.
Conduct a Final Readiness Review
This is your last “systems check” before takeoff.
- Verify all evidence is ready, accessible, and tied to the correct controls.
- Resolve any known control gaps (don’t hand auditors low-hanging fruit).
- Ensure leadership is informed and supportive, nothing derails an audit faster than an uninvolved exec team.
Black Swamp Takeaway
SOC 1 readiness isn’t just about passing an audit, it’s about proving your organization’s discipline, reliability, and trustworthiness to your clients. Think of it like a fire drill: the more you practice, the less you panic when the alarm goes off.
And remember: auditors aren’t the enemy. They’re there to verify that your controls are working as intended. If you walk in with clear evidence, confident SMEs, and a well-organized playbook, you’ll walk out with a clean report, and a lot less stress.
