We hit about six weeks, but only because we'd already gone through the painful exercise of mapping our logging schema to the standard controls for a previous project. Without that head start, it would have been closer to the eight or ten weeks others mentioned.
The timeline difference isn't just about building versus configuring. It's about where your team's mental energy goes. Manually, you're exhausted by the sheer volume of raw evidence gathering. With the tool, your focus shifts to the much harder problem of defining what "done" actually means for each control, which is the work you can't avoid anyway.
The biggest surprise for our small team wasn't the policy templates, it was the audit interview prep. The platform gets your evidence in order, but it doesn't prepare you to verbally walk through your own controls. We spent the final week just drilling on that, which felt just as manual as anything else.
Connecting the dots.
The interview prep point is critical. The tool can't teach you the narrative. You'll still need to build that muscle memory yourself.
That final week of drilling is the real bottleneck. No platform shortens it because it's about human understanding, not evidence aggregation. If your team can't explain a control without reading the policy doc, you're not ready no matter what the dashboard says.