More Time for What Matters: How CROP Automates Audit Procedures with Excel Agents

Challenge: Repetitive work slows down a hands-on Audit team 

For a firm like CROP, where professionals pride themselves on being close to their clients and focused on meaningful work, time spent on repetitive manual tasks was a recurring friction point. 

Procedures like operating expense testing are fundamental, but time-consuming, and all pull the team away from the areas where their expertise matters most. 

CROP needed a way to automate the routine without losing visibility into the work.

"DataSnipper Excel Agents gives you the freedom to use AI within your working papers. It's easy to try, and you can automate multiple workflows in a very natural way. It is really innovative."

Mark Rijksen

Senior Staff Audit & Assurance and DataSnipper champion

Solution: Automating the routine, keeping humans in control 

When CROP started using DataSnipper Excel Agents, their approach was practical: start with the tasks causing the most friction and automate them. 

Gert-Jan Brouwer (Partner and Innovation Lead Audit & Assurance) and Mark Rijksen (Senior Staff Audit & Assurance and DataSnipper champion) shared their experience with DataSnipper in their own words: 

Q: What was your first impression of Excel Agents? 

A: "I immediately felt this was a very good solution for our team. It's easy to use, and the tasks you can automate with Excel Agents are great. You can automate a lot with just a single prompt.” 

Q: What use cases are you using Excel Agents for? 

A: "We use Excel Agents with a long prompt that can automate the audit of operating expenses, especially the testing work. But also simpler things, like asking Excel Agents to review your working paper or reconciling your opening and closing balance. Those save 10 to 15 minutes at a time, but it really accumulates." 

For CROP, one of the standout capabilities of Excel Agents is the ability to extract data at scale. Rather than manually pulling information from individual documents, the team can instruct the agent to identify specific elements (like invoice data) across multiple documents and extract them all at once into Excel for further analysis. 

Q: What are the benefits of Excel Agents? 

A: "It's mostly saving time and being able to do more in a day. The quality of the output is also better. Repetitive tasks can be automated quite easily; with one prompt, it runs automatically." 

Q: Why DataSnipper over other AI solutions? 

A: "With DataSnipper, you can see the evidence behind every result, including the underlying source documents. With other AI software, you see the results, but it's much more difficult to trace back to the evidence. And the flexibility is key: you can design and develop your own agents, specifically tailored to each client. Some AI tools are more predefined, which makes them harder to use when the client's situation is different." 

Looking ahead: Consistent rollout with Agent Builder

Moving forward, CROP will take their agentic workflows even further, and scale them across the firm. 

Q: How are you planning to use Excel Agents in the future? 

A: "We are defining more areas where we would like to use Excel Agents. We want to develop more examples and use cases. And then we will definitely use Agent Builder within the whole organization to turn these workflows into reusable agents, improving consistency across teams and engagements.” 

For CROP, AI in audit is not a passing trend but a journey that will keep evolving. The focus now is on continuing to learn about AI, expanding use cases, and training the team to get the most out of the available solutions.