AuditFile builds a compliance-ready audit platform with self-hosted PDF editing

Steven Bong co-founded AuditFile(opens in a new tab) with his brother in 2011 with a simple premise: deliver the industry’s best cloud-based audit management solutions. Today, AuditFile serves thousands of auditors across six continents — from independent CPA firms to large government institutions. As CEO and lead developer, Bong has written the majority of AuditFile’s codebase himself, and he learned early that some problems are worth buying a solution for. PDF editing was one of them.

Controlling documents in a compliance-heavy world

Auditors work in a world of documents. Whether it’s financial statements, confirmations, working papers, or evidence files, the work of an audit is fundamentally annotating, reviewing, and signing off on PDFs. As AuditFile grew from a startup into an enterprise platform used by governments and large institutions, delivering a reliable, collaborative PDF editing experience built directly into the platform became essential.

The compliance requirements were strict. All audit files needed to live in customer-controlled infrastructure — specifically Amazon S3 buckets. Every PDF editor on the market required users to sign in through third-party accounts, which would hand over custody of sensitive documents to an outside party. On top of that, audits are team efforts; multiple auditors needed to mark up, annotate, and review the same PDF simultaneously, natively inside AuditFile, not in a separate tool.

With a small development team and a platform already demanding its full attention, building a solution from scratch was effectively impossible. Bong looked at various solutions on the market, but nothing checked all the boxes until he found Nutrient. When he saw the S3 integration working firsthand, he was immediately sold.

Implementing a self-hosted PDF engine that just works

AuditFile integrated Nutrient Document Engine into its codebase in 2021. Using Nutrient’s prebuilt library and documentation, Bong copied the example code, adapted it to AuditFile’s architecture, and had it live in under a week.

The setup is simple by design. When a user uploads a document, it lands in an S3 bucket owned and controlled by AuditFile. Nutrient Document Engine runs as a Docker container, talks directly to the database and the S3 bucket, and surfaces a fully built-in PDF editing and annotation experience inside AuditFile. No third-party sign-in. No external custody of documents.

Ongoing maintenance has required almost no engineering work. When Nutrient releases a new version, Bong simply updates the Docker image. The code he wrote five years ago is effectively the same code running in production today, a meaningful advantage for a small team.

Having a premium product that wins deals

The Nutrient integration didn’t just add a feature; it changed how AuditFile was perceived in the market. The polish and reliability of the PDF experience has become a closing tool. Prospective customers see collaborative editing in a demo and ask whether they need a separate license. When Bong tells them it’s built in and fully under AuditFile’s control, deals close that might not have otherwise.

Roughly 30 percent of AuditFile’s revenue comes from outside the United States, and many of those customers have strict requirements about where their data lives. Nutrient’s Docker-based deployment makes it possible to meet those requirements without major rework, opening doors to clients that would otherwise be out of reach.

Results by the numbers

Built to last

With Nutrient’s support, AuditFile was able to solve a problem that would have been nearly impossible to tackle alone: giving auditors a best-in-class, collaborative PDF editing experience inside a compliance-grade platform, with complete control over where documents live. What once would have taken months, at minimum, was live in a week. What might have required a dedicated engineering team to maintain runs today on a Docker image update.

For Bong, the value goes beyond the technical. Nutrient has enabled a small company to show up with the product quality of a much larger one, and to compete for — and win — clients that demand it.

AuditFile has plans to deepen its use of Nutrient’s capabilities over time. But the foundation — reliable, built-in, self-hosted document infrastructure — is already in place. Whatever compliance requirements AuditFile’s customers bring next, the platform is built to meet them.