DFP Partners Scaled Reporting Across 90 Clients with Inscope

DFP Partners’ broker-dealer practice prepares annual audited financial statements for more than 90 FINRA and SEC-registered broker-dealer clients, the majority of which file on a December year-end. The work is high-volume, formula-heavy, and concentrated into a compressed busy season window where every client needs the same level of attention at the same time. Before Inscope, the team was producing each set of financials through the standard Excel-to-Word chain.

• Excel-to-Word handoffs across clients: Each broker-dealer engagement required its own workbook, its own Word document, and its own set of manual tie-outs. Late-cycle adjusting entries meant updating numbers in multiple places, multiplied across dozens of concurrent engagements.
• Formatting work taking up preparer time: Table formatting, double-line rules, borders, and margin conventions varied by auditor and consumed time that should have gone to review and judgment. Several team members flagged formatting inconsistencies as a recurring drag on throughput.
• Version drift across a distributed team: With managers, seniors, and partners all touching files during the busiest weeks, keeping a single source of truth across that many concurrent engagements required constant coordination.
• Manual disclosure research: Pulling comparable footnotes from prior filings, checking auditor-specific language preferences, and confirming ASC guidance was done manually across each engagement.

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DFP Partners brought 90 broker-dealer clients onto Inscope ahead of year-end. Inscope handled the file migration and linking work so the team could stay focused on their clients.

• Live sync across every broker-dealer engagement: Once tables were linked from Excel into Inscope, late-cycle entries pushed through to the financial statements without manual Word updates. Across concurrent year-end engagements, that eliminated the manual tie-outs that cause the most errors at the worst possible time.
• AI-powered footing and inconsistency checks: AI ran footing, cross-footing, and inconsistency checks across the documents in real time. When a late adjusting entry came through, the team could re-verify every total in the document without doing the work by hand.
• Excel-native preparation: The team kept working in their existing workbooks. There was no requirement to restructure their files or change how they built their numbers, which kept the implementation friction low and the learning curve short.

DFP Partners worked through year-end with Inscope as the production layer, and came out of busy season with a clear view of what they want to scale into next year.

• More efficient close cycle: The team carried more than 90 concurrent year-end engagements through Inscope without expanding headcount, faster and more efficiently than the prior year’s manual process.
• AI checks became part of the review: Footing and inconsistency checks shifted from “thing we might do” to “thing we do every time.”
• Roll-forward planned ahead of the cycle: DFP expects to roll forward all year-end engagements going forward, giving the team lots of runway before reporting season opens rather than starting fresh under deadline pressure.

“Preparing financial statements is often manual, time-consuming, tedious and frustrating. Inscope made the process more accurate and efficient.”  
‍— Phyllis Chin, Accounting Principal, DFP Partners