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The description in your first paragraph sounds very much like a field exam role for ABL transactions. I had a role like this earlier in my career. The financial/credit analysis was very limited, in most cases the lender brought us in to check the box towards the end of their diligence process before closing the deal. They already ran their credit analysis.

What we were doing was creating our own borrowing base calculation at a very granular level, and telling the lender if the borrowing base in their credit agreement made sense. The lender would often adjust their borrowing base formulas based on the report we issued. There were some instances where a lender would bring us in much earlier in the process and we constructed the entire borrowing base for them. These reports would also include qualitative assessments of business, collateral protection, management teams, inventory controls, AR processes, cash application, payables analysis, among other items.

The grunt work is what I would consider to be "audit-light". The juniors perform a number of audit tests on site and the results of these tests flow into the borrowing base analysis. The mid-level team members did more analytical work when putting together borrowing bases and flagging items the lender should be concerned about, with some proposed solutions. Senior team members reviewed the reports and generally led discussions with lenders. There was actually quite a bit of writing and the reports could be pretty long. 

 Our diligence engagements were primarily for BB and other large commercial banks, and size usually ranged from $200M to $1B. 

Our work cadence was travel to borrower site for 1 week to perform field exam tests, interview management and various company personnel, tour the operations, perform some inventory counts, etc. Then we would be back in the home office spending the next week writing the report. Larger engagements could sometimes be 2 weeks across various sites with 2 weeks to write the report. There was travel all across the US and also internationally. However, I believe travel has decreased significantly since Covid. Hours were not bad, maybe topping out around 60-70, averaging around 40-50. 

The boring repetitive work was the testing, and this is the starting point for all the junior personnel. I hated much of this but it was helpful to get a baseline understanding the world of ABL and collateral risk. Things were much more interesting after you moved up and out of the testing weeds.

At the end of the day, I knew it was not a role I wanted to stay in long term. While not the same as a traditional Big 4 audit role, the job is still 50% audit-like, and in most cases you are just checking a box for the lenders before the deal closes. But it was a good learning experience and I had a very good understanding of collateral risk and ABLs coming out of that role. It is a good springboard into various lending groups (banks and PC) that focus on ABL, you will be in a good position to compete for portfolio management and underwriting roles in the ABL world.