It’s audit week. Your inbox is blowing up and the billing team is pulling late nights. Everyone’s stitching together binders, spreadsheets, and half-finished notes. It looks like you’re “getting ready,” but on the inside you’re crossing your fingers.
If you’re only thinking about audits when the notice arrives, you’ve already lost. The leaks started long before the auditor showed up. Claims were denied weeks ago, expired authorizations slid by unnoticed, and documentation errors piled up quietly in the background. The audit just makes all that impossible to ignore.
Five Audit Red Flags For ABA Practices
An ABA practice can feel they’re “in decent shape” for audits. They’re writing session notes, and tracking authorizations and credentials in a spreadsheet. They may even have ABA billing software. On the surface, it looks fine. But when payors or regulators dig in, they find holes that should’ve been covered.
1. Expired credentials that block revenue
It always seems to happen at the worst time. A BCBA®’s credential expires, no one catches it, and weeks of sessions suddenly can’t be billed. You thought the file was updated, but in the middle of an audit you realize it wasn’t, and the payor won’t budge.
2. Authorizations that run out before anyone notices
On paper, the calendar looked fine. But the insurance only approved 40 sessions, and 45 got delivered. By the time billing caught it, you’re eating the cost of those extra sessions. In an audit, that gap is evidence your system can’t keep up.
3. Session notes that don’t match the claim
An RBT® logs two hours, but billing goes out for three. Or the CPT code doesn’t line up with what’s documented. When session notes and billing live in separate systems, those mismatches are inevitable. They feel small when you catch them, but in an audit they’re flashing red lights.
4. Systems that don’t match each other
This one stings because you did everything “right.” The scheduler attached the right authorization, but the billing system pulled an older one. Your notes show the correct service, but the claim is tied to the wrong code. To an auditor, that’s three different stories for one session.
5. Payor rules that don’t line up with your records
It’s not enough to have session notes and authorizations on file. Auditors cross-check everything against the fine print in each payor’s contract. A Medicaid plan in one state may have stricter rules for authorizations than another. A private insurer might require specific language to prove medical necessity. If your system doesn’t account for those quirks, you can look compliant on paper but still be exposed in practice.
If you’ve ever seen claims denied for one of these reasons, you’re staring at the same gaps an auditor would.
📌 Also read: When ABA Data Looks Different Across Clinics, Directors Pay the Price
Why Last-Minute Audit Prep Always Backfires
If you’ve ever been through “audit week,” you know the drill. Everyone’s suddenly digging for signatures, pulling old notes, and asking staff to rewrite documentation that should’ve been clean in the first place.
On top of it, there’s the stress of knowing leadership is watching the bottom line, and the fear of missed revenue hanging over your head. Prep mode not only drains revenue, it also leaves people burned out.
Audits don’t punish you for what you missed in the last seven days. They punish you for what’s been slipping, silently, for the last six months. Claims, authorizations or credentials cannot be fixed retroactively. And when an auditor finds one error, they don’t stop there. They extrapolate it across months of claims, multiplying the impact and putting far more revenue at risk. You can only hope they miss it, or brace for denials and clawbacks.
The deeper issue is that most ABA practices are relying on systems that weren’t built for daily compliance. Spreadsheets, paper files, and generic billing software can hold up for a while, but they leave cracks that show up under audit.
What Being Audit-Ready Every Day Looks Like for ABA Practices
Real audit-readiness doesn’t look like more organized binders and frantic prep. It’s a system that keeps you in compliance without you having to think about it. That means:
- Proof is at your fingertips when payors ask, because dashboards keep requirements visible in real time.
- Fewer denials and faster reimbursements, because errors got flagged before claims even left the system.
- No late-night rewrites or mismatched claims, because session notes automatically feed billable claims with the trail already in place.
- You’re not blindsided mid-audit about expired credentials, because there was an automatic reminder weeks before to solve it in time.
The practices that have moved past binder chaos didn’t suddenly get better at paperwork. They did it by switching to systems that stop problems at the root.
That shift is what one of our customers, Anne Lau of ABC Group Hawaii, was talking about when she said:
“Before Motivity, we were all old-school paper users. Going through funder audits is now so easy! Not having to purge binders, shred, scan, or file data sheets, and having the peace of mind knowing where everything is all the time—is priceless. Our session notes are insanely easier now, too—so we can spend more time teaching our clients and less time documenting for compliance.”
For her team, the difference wasn’t more staff hours, it was Motivity. Authorizations now live inside the schedule, credentials come with reminders, and notes flow straight into claims. Instead of solving issues, her clinic walks into audits already covered.
Leave Audit Week Panic in the Past
If an audit announcement still puts you in crisis, you’re paying the price twice: once in daily denials, and again in wasted prep hours.
Audit readiness in ABA is a way of working. With Motivity, prepping for an audit becomes just another Tuesday at the clinic.
Want to see what that looks like for your ABA practice? Book a demo and we’ll show you how other practitioners have turned audit prep from weeks into minutes.