Two different industries wear the same word
When people say "compliance automation," they usually mean tools that sit on your side: they connect to AWS, Okta, GitHub, Jira and your HR system, collect evidence, and monitor settings. That work is genuinely useful. But those checks are readiness checks that you run on yourself. They are not an independent opinion, and by design they cannot be — independence rules require the firm that tests you to be structurally separate from the tooling you control.
The other side of the industry is audit execution: sampling across your observation window, reading policies against real configurations, chasing timestamps and approver names, and writing workpapers that stand up to review. This is the part that is still overwhelmingly manual — surveys of practicing auditors keep finding most of their week inside spreadsheets and PDFs. It is also the part your customers are actually relying on when they accept your report.
Skadi is on the second side. Audits are delivered on Skadi by a network of Independent CPA audit firms, and we built our automation for the testing itself.
Why "check the box" audits quietly fail you
A SOC 2 Type II covers a 3–12 month window. If the testing happens as a fieldwork sprint at the end, you find out about a broken access review in month two only when it is far too late to fix it cleanly. The report still gets issued, often with an exception you now have to explain in every enterprise deal for the next year.
That is a check mark that cost you money and told you nothing you could act on. The same effort, applied continuously, would have caught the drift in week three when it was a ten-minute fix.
Testing, not just collecting
Our automation reads your evidence against the Trust Services Criteria — policies versus actual configurations, tickets versus approvals — and flags genuine exceptions instead of summarizing what you uploaded.
Continuous, not a year-end sprint
We test across the observation window rather than at the end of it, so issues surface while you can still remediate them inside the period.
CPAs own the judgment
Automation handles volume and repetition. Licensed CPAs apply professional skepticism, resolve every flagged item, and sign the opinion. Human in the loop is not a slogan here — it is the control.
Defensible by construction
Every conclusion is documented to workpaper standard with the evidence it rests on, so the reasoning survives peer review, customer diligence, and your next auditor.
What changes for you in practice
You don't need a GRC platform to start
If you already run Drata, Vanta, Secureframe or something similar, we work directly with it. If you don't, we work with your raw sources — GitHub, AWS, your ticketing system, your identity provider. Buying a compliance platform first is a common way to spend six figures before anyone has told you what your audit actually requires. Talk to the auditor first.
On AI, plainly
The profession has no authoritative guidance yet on how far AI-assisted testing can go, and regulators are still working through what full-population testing means for inspections. We treat that as a reason for discipline, not for marketing. Our models run on evidence you control, every automated conclusion is reviewable, and a licensed CPA — not a model — issues the opinion. If we ever cannot show you why a conclusion was reached, we do not rely on it.
Our mission, stated once
Make the audit a tool that protects your business, not a check mark you buy once a year. That means catching real problems early, explaining them in language your engineers can act on, charging a price you can see upfront, and standing behind an opinion that holds up under scrutiny.
Want to see what your audit would actually look like?
Book 30 minutes with us and we'll walk through your scope, observation window, evidence sources, and price — before you commit to anything.