Challenge: Field Exam Writeup Time – Typing vs AI

Where Time Goes to Hide:

How Asset‑Based Lending Accidentally Invented Professional Typing Endurance.

Field Exam writeup time is a substantial portion of the delivered product and AI can save most of that time.

Exam Time Multitasking:

Examiners (Auditors) are detectives, they search through accounting data and piece together the workings of a business. A good Examiner can suss-out the irregularities that borrower management seeks to hide, spot an overstatement a mile out and separate the good intention from the fraudulent.

To do this Examiners have to get their hands dirty, wade through spreadsheets, search bills of lading even count inventory. Examiners need to be knowledgeable of business accounting and general practices, cunning and patient to do the job correctly. Exams also have a financial cost to the lender and borrower for time, travel, etc. Examiners also need to be more than accountants, they need to be reporters, assembling their findings into a nice, neat report for the lender. That report can take days to assemble and working on a tight deadline means that details are sometimes missed. The conclusion of an Exam isn’t when a single answer is found, it’s when the whole report is written, proofread and delivered after hours of fieldwork and exam writeup time. And then there are multiple people preparing and proofing.

The Writeup Time Truth:

The writeup aspect of the Exam is a place where time quietly disappears—like office pens or the last donut in the breakroom.

Let’s talk about how much time writeups actually take, what that means for examiner capacity, and why AI is the “employee who never complains.”

FinSoft analyzed 42 field examinations to answer a simple question:

“How much of the total exam time is spent writing the report instead of, you know… examining things?”

Here’s what we found:

On average, over a quarter of every field exam is spent on the writeup.

At the high end? Half the job.

At that point, the exam should come with carpal‑tunnel benefits. Exam reports take on average just over a quarter of the entire amount of actual Exam time. That means its takes just over 33% (.25/.75) of the field time spent investigating. This vortex of usable time can be worse than it seems, Examiner’s aren’t going to jump back on the road the second they finish a report, there are timing delays. Examiners may need several open weekdays and it is costly leaving on a Thursday to return again the next week. They need to book transit, be in-transit, and they need time to prepare.

The Examiner Calendar: Fewer Days Than You Think:

Now let’s look at how much time examiners really have in a year—because no one is billing 365 days unless they’re extremely unhappy.

So realistically, an examiner has about 194 billable days per year—assuming the stars align, eryone is healthy all-year long, no exams are canceled, and each week offers a chance to work and not be idled.

Every extra day spent on writeups directly eats into available exam capacity.

Enter AI: The Writeup’s Natural Predator:

Now for the fun part, the AI technological solution. Currently few utterances can conjure the same typhoon of hope, pessimism, curiosity and rage as the letters A.I. However, this technology has some tough issues for field examinations where the knowledge is spread across different schedules and footnotes. Blind prompts are not inciteful. Throwing spreadsheet tables against general AI knowledge produces hit and miss results, hallucinations and a lack of feedback to investigate what is not known from the data.

AI‑enabled reporting tools can reduce writeup time by roughly 90%. When applied to the FinSoft averages observed.

Average writeup time: 27.1%
Time saved with AI: ~24% (90% of 27.1%) of total exam effort.

That’s not shaving minutes, that’s shaving weeks over the course of a year.

What a 24% Time Savings Really Means
Let’s translate that into plain business speak:

24% more exams with the same staff.
24% less staff to do the same work.
24% more time available to investigate potential issues.

Same budget, same headcount, better outcomes.
Suddenly, capacity planning meetings become much shorter and consistency makes exam review times shorter too.

Billing Models – Profit and Cost Containment:

The impact on customer billing depends on how your shop operates—but every path leads somewhere good. We make no attempt here to say who is doing any of these things, these are just examples:

If You Don’t Bill for Writeup Time
Congratulations: you just unlocked pure margin improvement. No process changes required.

If You Bill Based on Actual Time
Less billable time, but more available examination coverage. About 24% more coverage (more exams with the same staff or 24% less staff for the same exam count). You can also spend the time digging deeper and asking about more specific changes and underlying documentation. You can increase sample sizes and test scope, etc. These additional underwriting steps can reduce losses.

If You Bill Based on Historical Time
Clients keep seeing familiar invoices, while operational efficiency quietly funds the department. Accounting likes this scenario. You are billing for more than the actual time.

If You Bill a Fixed Writeup Standard
For example: One writeup day per exam division, then you are billing for more than the actual time spent. Accounting likes this scenario too.

Other Benefits:

• AI doesn’t fall behind, and doesn’t ask why the writeup time is limited.
• Higher Utilization.
• Fewer partial weeks.
• Fewer idle gaps between exams.
• Utilization that actually beats the 80% mark.

Faster and Better: The Rare Combo
Speed alone isn’t enough—this is credit risk, not fast food.
AI‑assisted reports deliver:

• Consistent language across exams and examiners
• Embedded institutional knowledge
• Identification of adverse trends or conditions that tired humans might miss after their third rewrite

In short: fewer missed issues, fewer rewrites, and fewer awkward post‑approval conversations.

The “Soft” Benefits That Aren’t Really Soft:

Some gains don’t show up neatly in utilization metrics:

• Happier examiners (dangerously productive)
• Less burnout and turnover
• Faster delivery for lenders and borrowers
• Fewer personal time hours such as Sunday‑night report‑writing sessions being eliminated.

The Unspoken Thing…

Billing for writeup time can be an incentive to be inefficient or selfish to stay home longer. Sure, you use budgeted time to help with these issues, but we’re talking abut being almost 25% more efficient with AI.

These benefits vary by institution—but they’re very real, and they compound.

Final Thoughts:

“Time Is the Only Collateral You Can’t Re‑Borrow”
In ABL field exams, time has always been the constraint. The data makes one thing clear:

The writeup isn’t just paperwork—it’s one of the biggest capacity drains in the entire process.

When AI gives back 24% of total exam time, the question is no longer “Does this work?”
It’s “Why are we still typing again?”

For companies that don’t bill for write up time, the benefits of minimizing that time will be clear. Over time, practices that are more efficient with their use of time will receive competitive edge in the industry.

FinSoft’s AssetWriter-AI makes this all possible.

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