Careware Working Papers from Caseware International Inc

CaseWare Working Papers

1. Introduction

Audits are necessary for any organization especially operating in tight regulations and standards. Whether conducted in-house or by external party’s audit is sometimes a risky job and prone to huge liabilities if not properly planned and executed. It takes considerable amount of time, resources and qualified personnel’s. Audit working papers are the documents to record all the audit evidence during the financial statement audit. The purpose of working papers is signed, dated, and approval process, supervision and review, documenting sufficient and appropriate audit evidence. There are multiple providers for working paper which includes, ACL, Wolters Kluwer, CaseWare, Thomson, Data Prime Solutions, WorkPapers.Pro and Saltlake Infosolutions. Their products are ACL GRC, TeamMate, CaseWare Working Papers, Engagement CS, Draftworx, WorkPapers and APEX Audit System respectively. Using standardized auditing packages could save lot of time and amount and also reduces risks. Using standardized auditing packages reduces duplication of efforts, improve the quality of data/documentation captured during the process, gather sufficient and appropriate audit evidence and demonstrate compliance throughout the audit trail. Working in an accounting firm, my firm uses CaseWare working papers as the auditing tools that help the whole team to collaborate with the team, tracking progress, managing time and each audit assignments and giving feedbacks.

2. History

CareWare working papers is product of CaseWare International Inc, founded in Toronto in 1988, is a global software provider for accountants and auditors. It is an integrated system used to manage day to day operations in accounting, auditing, government and advisory industry. CaseWare Working Papers is flexible project management software that integrates everything you need to conduct assurance and reporting engagements.

1 It provides a one-stop location for your data – which allows for real time collaboration, direct scanning, online review, efficient clean-up, sophisticated lock-down and advanced roll-forward. Access to all the information you need during an engagement is readily available, with data linked so that any changes you make flow through to all related documents. It integrates data across different system and locations and ensure and provides consistency of reporting all over the organization. It makes financial reporting more efficient, uniformity and produces without errors.

3. Uses and Industry

CareWare working papers significantly decrease manual work required to perform an audit and assurance engagements leading to uniformity, consistency and quality. Audit and accounting firms are under pressure to cut costs and provide more valuable cost by decreasing cost and increasing quality. For audit, it collects and documents all the engagement requirements and support materials in one location easily accessible by team members and managing partner showing audit trail. It easily shows the task remaining and adding issues, review comments can easily identify and resolve the complicated issues by the senior level staffs. CaseWare working papers is not only applicable to accounting firms, it also provides equally benefits to corporate houses and government solutions. Its end to end financial reporting solutions fully automate the audit process, financial statement preparation and reporting solutions. It can be used in Financial reporting, internal audit and analytics as well for corporate and government solutions. It is specialized for audit and assurance engagements and tracker that allows teams to embed files in a document tree and can also track progress through preparer and sign-offs. The feature of compression allows all the documents in the file to be packaged into a single, smaller file for easy transfer.

4. Key Features and benefits

It provides various benefits and features for accounting firms. Caseware working papers makes is easy to complete any kind of accounting assurance engagement; from Basic to complex. Features which work well include: trial balance import, general ledger reports, consolidation, mapping and lead-sheets, adjusting journal entries, bookkeeping features, and year end close. Following are its key features and benefits:

4.1 Easy collaboration: Its SmartSync technology provides collaboration to the next level providing the teams with up to date changes to working papers without the need to manage synchronization. Each team members can work on their own copies of the client file in real time, with each file synced automatically in the background. Team members can work offline and can makes changes and the changes will be updated the next time connected to the network. Teams need not to wait for someone to return or pass on the file. Team manager can easily track individual progress through preparer, reviewer sign-offs.

4.2 Intelligent reporting: It enables Microsoft add-on for working papers and can easily synchronize the trail balance data to Microsoft word and excel template’s. It allows mappings, grouping of transactions, generating lead sheets for audit, Financial statement preparations, audit schedules preparation and uniformly presenting the information to complete the audit and assurance services.

4.3 Straightforward document management: CaseWare working papers enables to link with the source or supporting documents. It helps for the transparent and uniform referencing