Up to 90% Less Time on Audit Procedures While Ensuring Governance with Excel Agents
Key Highlights
- Save time: Up to 90% less time on some audit procedures.
- Centralized governance: Increased control and standardization across the firm with Agent Builder.
- Empower juniors: Early career team members are involved in higher-value judgment work.
Key Highlights
- Save time: Up to 90% less time on some audit procedures.
- Centralized governance: Increased control and standardization across the firm with Agent Builder.
- Empower juniors: Early career team members are involved in higher-value judgment work.
The Challenge: RSM’s Audit Team Buried in Repetitive Work
RSM Cayman dealt with a common challenge that every audit team faces: manual and high-volume testing.
Between the high volumes of tests of detail across expense testing, purchases and sales testing and significant year-end balance sheet accounts that required vouching to confirmations, the work was time-consuming and heavily reliant on repetitive manual effort.
RSM Cayman needed to reduce the manual burden while maintaining the traceability and governance that audit work demands. Excel Agents helped them overcome both challenges.
"DataSnipper Excel Agents have taken automation to the next level for our teams, helping us get even more value from the snipping and matching functionality we already use. With agent-driven document matching and verification, we have been able to significantly reduce the time spent on manual repetitive tasks. For some audit procedures, the time spent has decreased by as much as 90%."
Adam Passmore
Assurance Senior Manager
Solution: Saving time while ensuring governance
RSM Cayman rolled out DataSnipper Excel Agents across all audit team members to tackle data-entry-heavy and administrative procedures. They quickly identified a growing number of practical use cases that bring meaningful time savings, illustrated by the following examples:
Procedure | Before Excel Agents | With Excel Agents |
Expense testing against invoices and bank statements | ~4 hours | 30 minutes |
Year-end investment testing for large populations | ~6 hours | 30 minutes |
Audit working paper setup procedures | ~1 hour | Under 10 minutes |
How They Scaled It: Agent Builder
As one of DataSnipper’s key design partners, RSM Cayman was able to test and iterate alongside the team with Agent Builder, the latest innovation of Excel Agents. This enabled them to define their procedures once and turn them into reusable agents they could share across teams and engagements. Adam Passmore shares his experience:
Q: How are you using Agent Builder?
A: Agent Builder has enabled us to seamlessly integrate agentic AI into our audit working papers. We're building a centralized library of agents our teams can use routinely across the practice, with a process of approval, review, and sign-off before we push them out to the wider team.
Q: What are the benefits of Agent Builder?
A: The benefits from Agent Builder are two-fold: The main benefit is time savings from using the agents across our engagements. The second is managing those agents centrally, ensuring consistency, reducing the risk of unapproved use, and maintaining firm-wide standards. This allows us to maintain governance and oversight across our audits.
Q: What does your team do with the time they get back?
A: Excel Agents have freed up the most repetitive and manual work. Junior team members can now focus more on client relationships, communication, and understanding the risks associated with the client's operations. Now they can take more ownership of the next level in their role. Junior members are taking the lead and can perform their role to a higher capacity without focusing on those voluminous amounts of work.
Q: Why DataSnipper Excel Agents over other AI solutions?
A: DataSnipper is an audit tool first, and then it's got an AI layer on top of that. While other agents are built into Excel and can perform tasks in there, we don't see the same level of traceability from client information through to supporting documentation that, as an audit firm, we need to be able to see and re-perform in working papers.
Looking ahead: Expanding agentic workflows
RSM Cayman has already implemented Excel Agents for a significant portion of its audit procedures. Now, they are focused on identifying additional use cases to keep streamlining their processes and enhance their productivity. But for this firm, the real measure of success goes beyond time savings.
When the repetitive work disappears, something shifts. Junior staff step into roles they couldn't own before. Experienced auditors spend more time on relationships and risks. The whole team operates closer to their full potential.
