1
The Problem
ATKG is a San Antonio CPA firm whose assurance practice assists with financial statement preparation for close to 100 private clients a year, a mix of audits and reviews. The firm set out to standardize financial statement presentation across the entire book at the same time it was producing it, and the existing Excel-to-Word process made every change expensive.
- Formatting: Getting tables to look right was difficult. Columns landed in the wrong place, underlines and dollar signs had to be reapplied by hand, and a senior plus an admin spent real time on presentation rather than the numbers.
- Version control: With drafts living across separate files, the team risked working off the wrong version, and a reviewer could not easily see what had changed after sign-off, leaving open the question of whether an edit had slipped in unnoticed.
- Footing and tie-outs: The team footed and cross-footed, and the underlying figures tied out, but that work was not consistently evidenced in the file, and tie-out documentation was thinner than the practice wanted.
- Manual rollforward: Standing up each year's pro forma and carrying comparatives forward was a manual, handoff-heavy process, with prior and current year columns set up by hand before the team could begin.
2
The solution
ATKG adopted Inscope to replace the Excel-to-Word handoff with a live, Excel-native workflow that sits on top of their existing workbooks.
- Live sync: Inscope picks up directly from the linked Excel workbooks, so the team keeps its source files as they are. Tables and single values link into the document, and live sync pushes any Excel change straight into the statements and the footnote narrative.
- Automated rollforward: Inscope ingests the prior year PDF, rolls the document forward, updates dates and comparative amounts, and adjusts sentence structure (including dates that were never linked), so the team skips the manual pro forma setup entirely.
- Auto-formatting of tables: Pasting a linked table applies column widths, bold headers, dollar signs, and borders automatically. For the firm's more complex supplementary schedules, the team can layer in the original Excel formatting instead.
- AI review: Run footing, cross-footing, inconsistency, and disclosure checks on the document itself with AI assistantance. The team also leans on it for spellcheck, for surfacing missing or non-GAAP-compliant disclosures, and for drafting debt and line-of-credit disclosures from the underlying agreements.
3
Outcome
ATKG moved from a formatting-heavy process to one document the whole team works in, with the review and tie-out evidence captured in place.
- Fast team adoption: Once the team got hands-on with the tool, the value became clear and use spread quickly across the firm.
- Formatting time redirected to review: With Inscope handling presentation, the team spends its time on review and judgment rather than column widths and underlines.
- AI as a daily review partner: Spellcheck, disclosure-completeness, and GAAP-compliance prompts give reviewers a second pass without leaving the document, and disclosures can be drafted straight from a source agreement.
- Checks documented in one place: Footing and cross-footing run on the document, and the cleared results can be pulled as a PDF for the file, closing the tie-out and footing documentation gap the firm had flagged.
“It's a great tool. It pulls together work we used to spread across several different programs, and it takes the formatting off our plate so the team can spend its time on review and judgment."
- Matt Howell, Assurance Principal , ATKG