For accounting and CPA firms

Partners

Six things that change on your side.

These are the items that consume fieldwork hours and that a client cannot usually fix without a system change.

Direct, scoped auditor access

Read-only, time-bound, scoped to the entities and periods you need, with your own activity logged. Faster than fielding evidence requests through the client.

An audit trail that covers automation

Append-only and hash-chained, recording the reasoning, policy, and confidence behind automated actions — not just the resulting change.

Subledgers that already tie

Continuous reconciliation to control accounts, so the tie-out is a report rather than a week of work.

Point-in-time reconstruction

What the books looked like on any past date, which answers restatement and cut-off questions directly rather than by reconstruction.

Segregation of duties enforced

Conflicting authority combinations are rejected at grant time. A permission report by actor, scope, and verb is exportable and dated.

Evidence assembled continuously

Schedules and supporting documentation built through the year rather than in the quarter before fieldwork.

Auditor access, specifically

An auditor is an actor in the same permission model as everyone else, with grants scoped by entity, period, and object, and an expiry date. Access is read-only and cannot be widened by the client without a recorded change.

Your own activity is logged in the same trail as everyone else’s. That is deliberate: an access model that exempts the auditor is an access model with a hole in it, and you would be the first to say so.

An auditor who can query directly is faster than an auditor waiting on a controller to export something. The bottleneck was never the evidence, it was the queue.

Where we are genuinely limited

We are not an audit tool. We do not perform sampling, maintain workpapers, or produce audit programmes, and we have no ambition to. Your existing audit software stays exactly where it is.

We also do not make accounting determinations. Where a judgement is required — whether an obligation is distinct, whether a cost is capitalisable — the system records the determination and who made it. An agent is not permitted to make it, and that boundary is not configurable.

For nonprofit clients where fund accounting is the centre of the requirement rather than the context, we would tell you to look at Sage Intacct instead. It is better at it than we are and we say so on our own industry page.

If you refer clients

The terms are the same as for every partner: 10% of first-year subscription and 10% of initial professional services fees, paid quarterly once the client has paid us.

Disclosure to the client is a condition of the programme. If you receive a fee, your client must be told. We will confirm that with you, and if a client asks us directly whether their adviser is compensated, we will tell them.

We are aware this is stricter than the norm. Our own editorial policy criticises advisers who recommend vendors that pay them without adequate disclosure, and it would be incoherent to fund that practice while publishing that page.

There is also no fee at all when the honest answer is that a client should stay where they are, which is the outcome of roughly a third of our health checks. Nobody owes anybody anything in that case.

What we can do for you without a referral

A data diagnostic on a client’s books takes about a week from read-only access and produces written findings: duplicate rates, missing dimensions, unbalanced periods, and accounts untied for over a year. Those findings are frequently the thing you needed before starting fieldwork.

Across 74 diagnostics we have found that 31% of companies had at least one closed period that did not balance, and 64% had at least one balance sheet account with no reconciliation in over twelve months. In most cases nobody could say which accounts those were without checking.

Independence

We take no fees from any software vendor, including the ones we compare ourselves against. If you are advising a client on system selection and want an independent view, our selection advisory service is paid by the client rather than funded by a vendor, and it recommends competitors regularly. Where you would rather we stayed out of it entirely, say so and we will.

Questions

Common follow-ups.

Can we get direct access to client data?

Yes, as a scoped, expiring, read-only actor with your own activity logged. That is usually faster than fielding evidence requests through the client.

Do you replace audit software?

No. We do not do sampling, workpapers, or audit programmes and have no plans to. Your existing tooling stays where it is.

Do we have to tell clients about the referral fee?

Yes. It is a condition of the programme, not a suggestion, and we will tell a client ourselves if they ask us directly.

What if a client should not switch?

Then we say so and no fee arises. Roughly a third of our health checks conclude that no new software is needed.

What about nonprofit clients?

If fund accounting is the centre of the requirement, we would point you at Sage Intacct. It is better at it than we are and we publish that on our own industry page.