Colleen Knuff, Vice President of Product Management for Audit at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting North America, will be leading an Education Lab session at the AICPA Engage Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. In her session “Increase Your Value as a Client Advisor,” Colleen will explain why the AICPA emphasizes Audit Data Analytics (ADA) in reporting requirements, and how ADA tools create new possibilities for auditors to add value as advisors to their clients.
Additionally, on Tuesday, June 7, Knuff will be presenting a session – “Rewriting the Book on Audit” – during which attendees will learn how audit work is trending toward data-first audits, or cloud-enabled data integration. She will explain the technologies behind Wolters Kluwer’s evolving data-driven audit and show how data and automation can be incorporated into the audit process to reduce risk, add value, and complete audits more quickly.
“We provide diagnostics and coaching in our audit approach to guide auditors through the work they need to perform. Doing so creates a much more optimized and intelligent workflow that yields the profitable audit and satisfied client that every firm is looking for,” says Knuff. “Currently, you provide the audit opinion on financial statements, but wouldn’t clients be so much happier if you also came back to them with data visualizations to say, ‘Here’s how you compare to your peers in your industry,” or “here’s an analysis we’ve done over several years, along with where we think your business is going.”
ADA tools like Wolters Kluwer’s TeamMate® Analytics provide auditors with robust analytics without needing highly specialized technical training or data science expertise, making it possible to analyze even large amounts of data efficiently and effectively. Colleen will present key concepts during her presentation on Monday during the Education Lab session.
“The biggest complaint I get from our auditors is that sample sizes are too big. But the reality is if that is what your risk assessment is producing, then you have to approach it in a different way. So there's a lot of savings with TeamMate Analytics because it digs into those transactions that fall outside the curve or the spectrum of normal.” says Christopher O’Neal, CPA and Partner at Roedl Management Inc.
