Grant Thornton is dedicated to innovation and quality, empowered by insightful and collaborative professionals. So, when our professionals identified a challenge in performing and reviewing certain aspects of financial statements, we knew an intelligent automation technology could be part of the solution. Through alyx®, Grant Thornton’s streamlined concierge-enabled platform, we were able to quickly identify DataSnipper as the appropriate solution allowing our professionals to streamline important audit processes.

As DataSnipper makes it possible to prepare workpapers more efficiently, Grant Thornton auditors can now collaborate sooner to identify variations and reconcile items between clients’ books and records. This empowers auditors to spend more time collaborating on insights. DataSnipper also helps reviewers in a hybrid work environment by creating a robust audit trail. This means reviewers no longer need to search for supporting evidence within related support files or schedule extensive collaboration sessions with the preparer.

DataSnipper’s Financial Statement Suite (FSS) add-on module allows auditors to perform checks for mathematical accuracy, internal consistency, prior period consistency, and version comparison within one window. These automated tasks, which the firm previously performed manually, save time, and allow for quick escalation and resolution of issues. Engagement partners can also perform an independent final check of the financial statements prior to issuance within the tool.

Measurable Impact

Using DataSnipper’s Form Extraction, Grant Thornton identified an opportunity to process approximately 36.000 data points across 2.400 documents in about 30 hours. If performed manually, this would have taken around 600 hours. Even the previously custom process developed internally by Grant Thornton would have taken an estimated 60 hours. The audit trail generated by Form Extraction also allowed reviewers to review and identify potential problems more easily.