SB Partners

Company Profile

Founded in 1974, SB Partners is an independent, full-service accounting firm with approximately 65 employees based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. SB Partners offers a range of services, including strategic business advice, comprehensive accounting services, business valuations, consulting services, as well as corporate tax compliance, planning and dispute resolution services to privately owned companies, corporate subsidiaries, not-for-profit organizations and high-net-worth individuals.

Challenge

SB Partners has relied on the desktop version of Caseware Working Papers to improve its accounting and audit engagement workflows for many years. The solution gives the firm full visibility into its engagement workflows, simplifies the creation of reports, streamlines file management and improves communication and collaboration.

“I find Caseware Working Papers is very easy to use,” says Sierra Patfield, Manager, Assurance and Advisory with SB Partners. “It’s intuitive and easy to train users on. That in itself is very beneficial. It’s not a challenge to train new staff and co-op students on how to use it.”

While SB Partners’ engagement workflow worked well, the firm wanted to enhance the efficiency of its assurance practice by adopting an analytics solution. And storing the data from its Working Papers engagements on-premises was becoming cumbersome, with data storage requirements growing every year.

Solution

SB Partners turned to the Caseware Essentials Suite, an end-to-end hybrid platform that combines cloud and desktop technology to improve processes, workflows and the client experience. The suite includes:

• Caseware Working Papers, a powerful engagement management solution.
• Caseware Cloud, which streamlines client collaboration, centralizes file storage, automates engagement processes and enables real-time monitoring.
• Caseware PBC Requests, a product that enables accountants to create a secure, customized environment to communicate and share documents with clients.
• Caseware SmartSync, an offering that synchronizes document copies, allowing colleagues to work on the same documents without worrying about version control.
• Caseware Connector, which links data between Working Papers files and Microsoft Word/Excel documents, and rolls over files year-over-year with automatic data linkages.
• Caseware Accomplish, a cutting-edge workflow management application.

The firm has also begun rolling out Caseware IDEA, a powerful data analytics solution that allows auditors to deliver deeper, more timely insights that lead to better business decisions.

Results

Having SmartSync running with Working Papers has helped the SB Partners team work more efficiently on engagement files.

“It’s been a helpful tool for our team,” Patfield says. “It lets us work collaboratively and make sure work doesn’t get overwritten or duplicated.”

She notes that in a previous job with another company, her team did not have SmartSync, which made it difficult to synchronize files and forced the team to save their engagement files onto a drive or secure location.

Caseware Connector has also proved beneficial, allowing accountants to easily roll client data over from one year into another, improving efficiency.

The Future

SB Partners’ assurance team has been piloting Caseware IDEA and the firm plans to continue rolling the product out over time.

“We have some managers and preparers who have used IDEA at other companies and suggested it was something that would benefit us,” Patfield says. “They believe it will make our assurance work more efficient going forward.”

The firm also plans to continue leveraging Caseware Essentials to make the firm’s processes more efficient. Patfield expects the company to move towards a hybrid environment in the near future.

“One of our biggest issues right now is storage for our Working Papers data,” she says. “We’re looking into using the hybrid cloud model for our storage.”

Learn how you can improve your audit and accounting engagement workflows with Caseware Working Papers.