Engagement Programs Offer Keys to Efficiency -- How Can You Unlock the Door?

The CPA Technology Advisor
Review of Engagement & Trial Balance Systems
Aug. 2006 Issue
By Tom Davis, CPA
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Financial statements, business tax and other core accounting firm services focus on the client’s GL balances as the basis for the end product. GL balances are adjusted, grouped and put in the appropriate format. However, there is a lot more to the work processes of preparing financial statements and tax returns than simply working with account balances. Multiple staff, dozens of work steps and hundreds of working papers are involved in providing these services.

Back in the early ’80s, some of the first applications designed specifically for accounting firms were built to improve the efficiency of manipulating GL information. The early Coopers and Lybrand, Financial Audit Systems’ FAST! applications and the AICPA’s ATB package were “trial balance” applications that became standard tools in almost every firm. While trial balance capabilities are still core features in many packages, today’s tools have evolved to include features for creating workpapers, managing workflow, and managing engagement workflow and other areas of the trial balance-related engagement.

When looking at workpaper and trial balance applications, you need to focus on efficiency. Spend time developing the organization structure, processes for setting up information and review procedures. Then, train firm members extensively and enforce compliance with the firm’s standards. While it may be necessary to have different standards for different types of services, tight standardization will reduce the effort it takes to get new users up to speed, provide more uniform workpapers from job to job, and reduce the amount of preparer and high-cost reviewer resources used.

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