There are several emerging technologies that firms can use to perform additional portions of engagements electronically. Workpaper containers, trail balance software, electronic engagement programs, and computer assisted audit tools (CAAT) can all produce significant savings in engagement time.

Firms can greatly improve efficiencies in preparing financial statements and tax returns by using a Windows workpaper application. These applications are more efficient for setting up information. They can produce final quality financial statements and greatly reduce high-priced review time. This can result in hundreds of dollars of savings on engagements. Windows workpaper applications can share information with other applications to speed up the preparation of tax returns and complex workpapers. Linking workpaper information to a tax application can save $50 to $100 per engagement, compared to re-keying the information into the tax system. We have found CSI GoSystems Audit and CCH AuditVision to be the easiest Windows workpaper applications to use for preparing financial statements, tax returns, and complex workpapers. They can handle statement formats ranging from simple to complex, and have features for presenting multi-column financial statements for fund, divisional, and consolidated entities. These tools can improve efficiencies in preparing financial statements and tax returns from client general ledger account information.

Workpaper containers will greatly simplify the performance of engagements by adding structure to the electronic documents created in the field and in the office. The tools offered by PPC and ePace! will be joined by offerings from CSI, Lotus Notes and others this year. CAAT Tools have the potential for greatly reducing the efforts needed to extract meaningful information from a client’s transactional data. This offers the opportunity to improve auditing efficiency, as well as to provide ongoing services to clients such as trend identification and critical transaction analysis. We work with the ACL Computer Assisted Audit Tool.

Services that we can perform in the electronic engagement area are development of firm procedures, training, and on-going support. This will insure you will get a high degree of standardization that will translate to lower engagement costs and consistent, high quality financial statements, tax returns, and workpapers.

We are well aware of the magnitude of technology change that firms like yours are facing. We understand the resistance to change that you will encounter as firm members are faced with using the new tools. The bottom line is that there are more profitable ways to conduct business within a CPA firm. We can help you plan these changes to insure you will get a good return on the resources you are investing in.


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