5 Audit Challenges Firms are Conquering with Practice Intelligence Software

What if every partner at your firm could open a dashboard and instantly see the status of every engagement, where bottlenecks are forming, and how cycle times are trending over the past year? 

What if your audit teams no longer had to waste hours pulling financial data for advisory colleagues, because the numbers were already searchable, exportable and ready to use? 
And what if you could walk into every client meeting not just with an audit opinion, but with clear performance insights that helped shape their business strategy? 

This isn’t a distant vision. Firms like Demers Beaulne and Novogradac are already working this way with Caseware Sherlock. By consolidating engagement data, automating repetitive tasks and delivering powerful visualizations, Sherlock turns “what if” into “what’s next” for modern audit practices. 

Drawing on the experiences of Demers Beaulne and Novogradac, let’s look at five common challenges audit firms face and how Sherlock is turning them into opportunities. 

1. Audit metadata is hard to see and act on 

For many firms, engagement information lives within individual working papers or in separate systems that rarely connect with one another. When there’s no single view of the work, audit leaders are left guessing about the status of each engagement, the issues that might be taking shape or the trends that need attention. Without that visibility, it becomes harder to direct your resources where they’re needed most and small problems can grow before anyone has a chance to address them. 

Sherlock addresses this challenge by aggregating metadata from all engagements in one environment. Michael Zipkin, Senior Manager, Assurance at Demers Beaulne, described the benefit in simple terms: “All the metadata that is contained within our engagements is available in Caseware Sherlock.… We can see at a glance where we’re at in terms of our engagements.”  

Instead of piecing together progress from multiple sources, managers can open a dashboard and immediately see status indicators and key metrics. Having this level of oversight can help you manage your current workloads and lay the groundwork for the next challenge, which is improving your efficiency in a measurable way. 

2. Audit efficiency is difficult to measure 

Even when your firm knows that bottlenecks exist, it can be hard to pinpoint where exactly your time is being lost without clear data on your audit cycle times. Minor inefficiencies might go unnoticed for a single engagement, but when multiplied across dozens of clients, they can lead to significant delays and cost overruns. 

Sherlock makes your efficiency visible by tracking the timelines of each engagement. It shows how long different phases take, identifies outliers and reveals patterns that might not be obvious in your day-to-day work.  

Rob Valdez, Director of Business Intelligence at Novogradac, explained, “We can actually see how long it’s taking us…and then how is that average changing over time?” He noted that trimming even small amounts of time “can really scale up to great savings and benefits” when applied across their portfolio. 

The insights gained here make it easier to set realistic benchmarks and target process changes. They also connect directly to the next challenge: ensuring valuable financial data is available to the right people without adding to your audit workloads. 

3. Firms struggle to deliver insights, not just audits 

Clients increasingly want more than a simple audit. They expect insights drawn from their data that can help them understand their performance and plan for the future. Such an analysis can be difficult without the right tools, though, especially when your teams are already stretched thin while trying to meet all applicable compliance requirements. 

Sherlock enables client-facing dashboards that summarize year-over-year trends and highlight key performance indicators. These visuals put raw figures into context so your clients can act on them.  

Sherlock streamlines benchmarking by standardizing client financial data and comparing it against industry norms or peer groups. Its dashboards highlight key ratios and trends, helping firms quickly spot outliers, assess risks and identify performance improvement opportunities. This turns audits into actionable insights that add advisory value for clients. 

“We can provide them with a set of performance indicators to let them know how their year went and the performance over time,” Zipkin said. 

By integrating these insights into ongoing conversations, firms can position themselves as strategic advisors as well as assurance providers. That ability to pivot from compliance to strategy leads directly into the next priority, which is using detailed data segmentation to refine your performance across different parts of the practice. 

4. The challenge of interoperability 

One of the most overlooked challenges firms face when adopting advanced analytics platforms is interoperability. Many organizations already invest heavily in business intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau or Power BI, but the real value of these tools can only be unlocked when they are seamlessly integrated with the firm’s other systems. Without interoperability, valuable data remains siloed, creating inefficiencies and limiting the potential for firmwide insights. 

Sherlock addresses this challenge directly with its robust API capabilities. Firms can easily retrieve engagement metadata and feed it into existing BI environments like Tableau and Power BI. This ensures that Sherlock is not just another isolated tool, but rather a driver of connected ecosystems where data flows freely between systems. 

By leveraging Sherlock’s APIs, firms can build unified reporting ecosystems that empower decision-makers at every level. The result is an environment where engagement data  actively informs firmwide reporting, enhances visibility and drives smarter strategies. 

5. It’s hard to optimize all segments of the practice 

Without the ability to segment your audit data, it can be difficult to see where specific types of engagements are performing better or worse. This limits innovation within specialized service lines or programs, such as niche industries or tax incentives. 

Sherlock supports detailed subsegmentation across verticals, incentives and audit types, giving firms a granular view of their performance. Valdez explained, “We can start to subsegment our practice…dive into different granularity of detail and see where we can actually stand to benefit even more.” 

This level of analysis makes it possible to refine your procedures, whether that means adjusting your resource allocation, revisiting methodologies or focusing your training on specific engagement types. And when these insights are combined with the previous solutions, the results can be transformative. 

Connecting the solutions 

While each challenge is distinct, the solutions often overlap and build on one another. Consolidating data gives managers a clearer picture of where their team’s time is being spent. That visibility makes it easier to track your efficiency over time, and efficiency gains free up your resources to generate even more meaningful client insights. Standardized processes and segmentation can help you apply those insights across the practice. 

Both Demers Beaulne and Novogradac have shown that adopting Sherlock is more than just adding new software to your stack.  

Caseware’s audit practice intelligence software becomes part of your firm’s daily operations. Your staff will grow to trust its dashboards and reporting tools as a dependable reference point. Over time, the insights Sherlock provides will become a part of your team’s everyday client conversations, strengthening your firm’s relationships and demonstrating the value of a data-driven approach. 

Unlock the full potential of your audit practice 

The amount and complexity of clients’ audit data will only continue to grow. Rules will keep changing, and clients will keep expecting more. Firms that structure their processes around flexible, data-driven tools will be better equipped to adapt. Sherlock supports that readiness by organizing large datasets, automating repetitive tasks and delivering powerful audit data visualizations that make its findings clear to both auditors and their clients. 

For firms that are already using Sherlock, the next opportunity lies in deepening the integration across all service lines. For those still evaluating, the examples above show that the benefits are attainable and can be realized without disrupting the core of your practice. 

See what’s possible with the right tools. Get in touch with us to learn more about Caseware Sherlock.