UK Firm Reduces Financial Statement Review Times with Caseware Validate

Key Highlights

• MHA needed a firm‑wide solution that could standardize the review workflow, reduce time on every draft, and, most importantly, deliver rock‑solid accuracy that auditors could trust. 
• MHA chose Caseware Validate, a cloud-based solution that runs thousands of checks on financial statements in seconds with AI-powered precision, eliminating errors, accelerating review times, reducing manual work and ensuring compliance.
• Validate delivered the highest level of accuracy, enhanced auditor confidence and significantly improved efficiency without compromising quality. 

“Validate gave us more assurance. It was more prudent, more robust and made us think critically about the output.” 

Bronwen de Abreu, Technical Director for Audit Data Analytics, MHA 

Company Profile 

MHA is a leading UK firm of chartered accountants, tax advisers and business advisers, and the exclusive UK member of Baker Tilly International. With more than 20 offices across the UK, the firm combines deep local insight with the reach and resources of a 700‑office global network to help organizations and individuals achieve long‑term success. 

Backed by approximately 1,900 professionals, MHA delivers a full‑service offering that spans audit and assurance, tax, corporate finance, business advisory, outsourced finance and private‑client wealth services.  

Challenge 

With thousands of audit engagements each year, MHA’s teams spent significant time on manual financial statement reviews. Each set of accounts typically took close to an hour to cast, cross‑check and reconcile, with processes varying by office.  

Some teams used printed statements, others entered figures into Excel or relied on limited automation from a third-party Excel tool. Reviewers often marked up Word documents or performed calculations manually, using disconnected methods.. 

While teams maintained thorough reviews, the absence of a unified platform made consistency and prevention of errors challenging, without additional oversight. This decentralized approach limited the ability to scale review quality and efficiency as the firm continued to grow. 

MHA sought a firm‑wide solution to standardize the review workflow, reduce time on every draft, and, most importantly, deliver rock‑solid accuracy that auditors could trust. 

“Everyone wants efficiency,” noted Bronwen de Abreu, Technical Director for Audit Data Analytics at MHA. “But due to my technical background and because we’re in a highly regulated market, I knew quality was the more important thing.” 

Solution 

De Abreu brought a rare blend of audit depth and change‑management knowledge to MHA’s technology search. After qualifying as a CA (SA) at KPMG South Africa and transferring to KPMG London’s insurance department, she pivoted into learning and development, first training auditors at KPMG, then aspiring ACA candidates at Kaplan. Her transition into data analytics integration developed during her time at the mid-tier firm where she identified the need to bridge the gap between the introduction of audit technology and its use in the audit service line. 

When MHA hired her as the lead on audit data analytics, she quickly targeted one of the firm’s most time‑consuming tasks—financial‑statement reviews.  

De Abreu already had experience using a third-party tool for financial statement reviews in a previous role, but she didn’t want to default to it, without examining other options.  

“I had heard whispers about Validate and decided to investigate further,” she said. “I didn’t want to just automatically go with the product I was accustomed to using.” 

Caseware Validate is an intelligent automation tool built to simplify and accelerate the financial statement review process. By rapidly scanning and testing financial data for accuracy and consistency, Validate reduces the need for manual intervention, minimizes the risk of errors and significantly shortens review timelines. 

Results 

To find the ideal firm‑wide solution, MHA ran a data-driven, head‑to‑head pilot between two shortlisted financial statement review tools. Audit staff put both platforms through identical tests using the same sets of accounts. The selection criteria were: 

• Efficiency – Validate cut average casting time from 25 minutes to 12 minutes and reduced a full first‑pass review from 58 minutes to 42 minutes, setting the stage for significant annual time savings when rolled out across thousands of engagements.  
• Quality/False Positives – Validate delivered zero false positives – cases where a tool says something is correct, when it is in fact wrong – and flagged “indeterminate” items that prompted appropriate professional judgement, giving auditors greater confidence in the results. The lack of false positives was a key consideration for MHA. 
• Casting accuracy – Validate identified issues that could be missed in manual reviews. It flagged inconsistencies or potential errors more reliably. 
• User Interface – Because Validate runs as a standalone, cloud‑based application (not an Excel add‑in), it eliminated the crash‑and‑data‑loss issues teams sometimes encountered in large workbooks when using the competing tool.  
• Version comparison – Validate automatically carries forward previously reviewed items and highlights only what’s changed. This meant that teams didn’t waste time re-checking sections that were already accepted in prior reviews. 

After weighing the results, MHA selected Caseware Validate as the firm’s financial statement review platform, confident it would deliver the consistency and quality its audit practice demands.  

For example, when checking statements the competing product would only look at the numbers, whereas Validate would look at both the number and description. 

“Validate gave us more assurance,” de Abreu explained. “It was more prudent, more robust and made us think critically about the output.” 

“We never encountered any false positives,” she noted. “We also found the ‘maybe’ or indeterminate flag in Validate particularly useful. It didn’t just give us a simple yes—it prompted us to think critically and apply our professional judgement, rather than solely relying on the software.” 

The Future

Backed by a strong business case highlighting both quality gains and cost savings, de Abreu mandated adoption of Validate across MHA’s offices. To ease initial resistance, she encouraged hesitant users to simply “spend five minutes” with the tool, a tactic that proved effective.  

With Caseware Validate now established as MHA’s firm-wide standard for financial statement reviews, de Abreu and her team are focused on driving deeper adoption and unlocking its full potential.    

While the platform has already delivered notable time savings and quality improvements, de Abreu sees further opportunities to enhance workflows, particularly through greater use of advanced Validate features like referencing and version tracking. 

As more staff become familiar with Validate, de Abreu expects continued gains in both efficiency and review quality. “Everyone has that fear factor at first,” she said. “But once they try it, they never want to go back.”