From Hours to Minutes: How Synectic Automated Substantive Testing and Financial Statement Reviews with Caseware  

Key Highlights 

• Facing limited junior staff and growing audit demands, Synectic needed a way to streamline time-consuming, manual tasks like substantive testing and financial statement reviews without compromising quality. 

• The firm adopted Caseware Extractly and Validate to automate key audit procedures, enabling scalable, accurate testing and efficient document review at a price point that fit their practice. 

• Synectic dramatically reduced testing time, improved accuracy and shifted team culture toward automation, allowing them to handle increased audit volume without additional staffing. 

“What would have taken two or three hours, probably longer for our larger clients, is now a matter of minutes.” 

Ben Coull, Director, Synectic

Company Profile 

Synectic Accountants & Advisers is a comprehensive business services firm delivering audit, financial planning, tax, business consulting and superannuation services to a diverse client portfolio. With approximately 50 professionals serving not-for-profits, large private companies and commercial enterprises across construction, logistics and manufacturing, the firm has built its reputation on delivering thorough, locally informed expertise. 

Challenge 

Like many firms, Synectic faced growing pressures around staffing and efficiency. “We don’t offshore any of our work,” said Ben Coull, Synectic’s Director. “We have a reasonably solid senior-level team, but we’re quite light at the junior level. We just don’t have the brute manpower to throw at the old-fashioned ‘tick and bash’ tasks that we used to do when I was growing up as a junior.” 

This shortage of junior resources posed a fundamental question: how could the firm maintain audit quality and efficiency without simply adding more headcount? For Coull, the answer was clear—lean into automation. The team set its sights on two labor-intensive areas ripe for improvement: substantive testing and financial statement reviews. These tasks, while necessary, were often repetitive and low-value, consuming significant time without requiring much professional judgment. 

Substantive testing, in particular, involved combing through high volumes of client documentation—monthly statements, transaction listings and government forms—and manually verifying details against client records. This process was slow, tedious, and prone to transcription errors. 

Financial statement reviews brought a different set of challenges. When clients sent externally prepared statements, comparing versions manually left room for missed edits, especially unexpected ones. “Clients would change something you didn’t want them to change and you didn’t go looking for it because you weren’t expecting it to change,” Coull explained. The lack of efficient version control increased audit risk and placed added strain on the team. 

But technology alone wasn’t the full solution. “The biggest hurdle was cultural,” Coull noted. “When confronted with a task, the first reaction shouldn’t be ‘What did we do last year?’ or ‘How do I do this manually?’ It should be, ‘What opportunities are there to utilize the automation tools we’ve got?’” Cultivating that mindset shift was critical to unlocking the value of any new system. 

Solution 

Synectic’s search led the firm to Caseware Validate for financial statement reviews and Caseware Extractly for substantive testing. The two tools offered exactly what Synectic needed: sophisticated automation at a reasonable price point.  

Extractly’s templated automated extraction feature was especially appealing to Coull’s team, particularly for audits in the aged care sector, where clients receive standardized monthly government subsidy statements. These engagements often involve large volumes of complex, irregularly formatted documents that are time-consuming and error-prone to audit manually. By setting up templates and uploading these documents in bulk, Synectic can now perform substantive testing at scale, turning a traditionally tedious process into a streamlined, high-efficiency workflow. 

“We have clients in the aged care sector whose revenue is primarily government-funded subsidies,” Coull explains. “They get monthly statements with all the information on their residents and subsidy amounts. In the past, we’d go through those 12 monthly statements, copy out the numbers, check them off, tie them back to the client’s records. It’s a good substantive audit procedure, but incredibly time-intensive.” 

For financial statement reviews, Synectic implemented Validate. Having compared it directly with a competing product, Coull found Validate to be superior in several key areas: it was more reliable at identifying relevant data across pages, offered better capabilities for recognizing and redefining tables, and provided a more intuitive user interface. 

Results 

Extractly delivered immediate and measurable time savings across Synectic’s client base. The most dramatic improvement came with the aged care audits. “What would have taken two or three hours, probably longer for our larger clients, is now a matter of minutes,” Coull explained. 

The accuracy improvements proved equally valuable. Extractly eliminated the transcription errors inherent in manual data entry, making the substantive testing process “a lot more reliable.” This reliability extended beyond aged care to any standardized government documentation, including tax returns and business activity statements, where the rigid formatting of government paperwork created ongoing opportunities for template-based automation. 

Synectic now processes half a dozen aged care clients with multiple facilities using these automated approaches. The scalability has proven particularly valuable as the firm can handle increased volume without proportional increases in staff time. 

For financial statement reviews, Validate’s version comparison functionality allows auditors to focus exclusively on modifications between document versions, dramatically improving both efficiency and thoroughness. 

“The real benefit is in the subsequent versions when you import those and then you only have to look at what’s actually changed from the previous version,” Coull noted. This capability directly reduces audit risk by eliminating the scenario where “clients would change something you didn’t want them to change and you didn’t go looking for it because you weren’t expecting it to change.” 

Validate’s superior data identification capabilities compared to competing products provided additional value. The tool’s enhanced table recognition and redefinition functionality, combined with better user interface design, created a more reliable and user-friendly experience for the audit team. 

Beyond measurable time savings, Synectic achieved a fundamental shift in team mindset. “Some people have gotten on board quicker than others,” Coull noted. “But it’s about making automation part of the way we do things now.” 

The success in audit led to broader adoption across service lines. Synectic’s consulting team, handling internal audits and carbon accounting, embraced the tools even more enthusiastically. “They’re great at using AI and technology,” Coull noted. “There’s been plenty of scope for them in dealing with significant amounts of documents.” 

The Future 

Coull expressed particular excitement about Caseware’s integration roadmap, especially the planned connection between Extractly and Caseware’s cloud-based audit platform. “When it gets integrated with that platform, it’ll probably be a massive step forward in terms of auditors being able to benefit from this sort of technology.” 

For Coull, technology adoption isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about survival. “To stay relevant, this is something we have to get on top of. If you’re serious about being in this industry for the long term, and you’re not starting to look at this sort of stuff now, you’re going to get left well and truly behind.” 

His advice for other customers considering similar tools? “It was a reasonably affordable way to get into exploring these tools. I can’t quantify all the benefits, but if you’re serious about being in this industry long-term, you need to start looking at this stuff now.” 

Get in touch with us today to see how Caseware can help your firm streamline audits.