From Hours to Minutes: Up to 90% Less Time on Audit Procedures with Excel Agents

Challenge

The standout opportunity for RSM Cayman was managing the high volume of tests of detail across expense testing, purchases and sales testing, and significant year-end balance sheet accounts that required vouching to confirmations.

This work demanded substantial time from team members and involved a high level of repetitive manual effort. By reducing these tedious tasks, the team is now able to spend more time in the reviewer role and on audit areas that require professional judgment.

"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

All audit team members use DataSnipper Excel Agents to support data-entry-heavy audit procedures and some administrative procedures.

Through consistent use of Excel Agents, they have seen several benefits:

• Maintaining a high level of audit quality in audit working papers while being prepared in far less time.
• A more consistent testing layout.
• Smoother reviews due to a consistent output format from the agents.

In some cases, procedures that previously took four to five hours can now be completed in around 30 minutes.

Use Cases

RSM Cayman has identified several practical use cases where DataSnipper Excel Agents have delivered meaningful time savings:

• Expense testing against invoices and bank statements, where completion time has been reduced from around 4 hours to 30 minutes.
• Year-end investment testing for large populations, where the process has been reduced from approximately 6 hours to 30 minutes.
• Audit working paper setup procedures, an administrative task that typically took up to 1 hour, can now be completed in less than 10 minutes.

Looking Ahead

RSM Cayman wants to ensure its teams are fully aware of the available DataSnipper Excel Agent use cases and the time savings these tools can deliver.

By increasing adoption, understanding, and developing additional use cases, they aim to help teams reduce time spent on repetitive manual tasks and spend more time understanding clients and focusing on areas that require professional judgment.