Budget for record retrieval, translations where needed and review of travel or entity changes, separately from filing charges. A complicated history may require more preparation even when the technical knowledge evidence is straightforward.
Establish eligibility before spending on filing
Ask which missing records are material and whether the intended filing date is supportable. Government fees, applicable additional charges, optional premium processing and dependent applications depend on the route. Spending more on expedited processing cannot create qualifying employment time that has not occurred, so the chronology should inform the filing budget.
An employment audit is generally modest relative to the cost of a filing that fails on a point the audit would have found, so the sequence is worth preserving even when it feels like a delay. Scope it explicitly: reviewing contracts, payroll and tax records, building a travel chronology, identifying the capacity during the relevant period, and reporting on whether a qualifying year can be established. Ask what happens if the answer is no, and whether the adviser will say so plainly.
Where records are held across jurisdictions or in a system the company has since replaced, retrieval may add cost and time. Establishing eligibility before commissioning the substantive preparation avoids paying for a technical argument that a chronology would have shown to be unnecessary.