An audit firm saved 15h/week per auditor with AI

This audit and financial advisory firm, established in Bordeaux for fifteen years, had built its reputation on rigor and quality. But this rigor came at a cost: every audit engagement began with a document collection phase that could last two to three days. Auditors spent their time sending follow-up emails, sorting documents received in heterogeneous formats, and manually verifying compliance for each piece.

The managing partner contacted us after calculating an alarming figure: 35% of his auditors' time was spent on non-billable tasks, primarily document collection and sorting. On a typical 15-day engagement, this represented over 5 days of low-value work. Per-engagement profitability had been declining steadily for two years, and the firm was starting to lose tenders against more agile competitors.

Our diagnostic identified three major bottlenecks. First, document collection was entirely email-based: the client sent documents piecemeal, in varied formats (PDF, Excel, photos of paper documents), with no structure. Second, compliance verification was manual: each auditor had to verify that all required documents were present, complete, and compliant with standards. Third, the preliminary summary was written by hand, compiling information scattered across dozens of documents.

The first building block of our solution was a secure client portal. Each engagement automatically generates a dedicated space where the client finds an interactive checklist of documents to provide, adapted to the engagement type (statutory audit, contractual audit, due diligence). The client uploads documents directly to the portal, and the system verifies format, readability, and completeness of each piece in real-time. If a document is missing or unreadable, the client receives an immediate notification with precise instructions.

The second building block is the AI preliminary analysis agent. As soon as a document is uploaded, the agent analyzes it automatically. For a balance sheet, it verifies total consistency, detects significant variances, and identifies items requiring particular attention. For a contract, it extracts key clauses, maturity dates, and financial commitments. For an invoice, it checks VAT compliance and consistency with purchase orders. All these analyses are compiled into a preliminary report that the auditor can review before even beginning their in-depth analysis work.

The automated follow-up system was a game-changer for client relations. Rather than harassing clients by email, the system sends progressive, contextualized reminders. A first friendly reminder email after 48 hours. A more insistent second reminder after 5 days, with the precise list of missing documents. After 7 days, an alert is sent to the engagement manager for personal intervention. This progressive escalation pushed the document completeness rate at D+7 from 45% to 92%.

The Caseware integration, the firm's engagement management tool, was achieved via API. Collected and analyzed documents are automatically indexed and linked to the correct engagement, client, and audit file section. Auditors find everything in the right place, without any manual handling. The AI-generated preliminary summary note is directly integrated into the working file, ready to be reviewed and enriched by the auditor.

Results transformed the firm's economics. Each auditor now saves 15 hours per week, time reinvested in high-value analysis. Document collection time was reduced by 60%. Per-engagement profitability increased by 25%. Compliance errors, which affected 12% of files, dropped to 0.5%. And the full project ROI was achieved in just two months. The managing partner sums it up: 'Our auditors finally do the work they were trained for.'