Immediate return on our investment from day 1
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Interview with Jim Bourke
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Why did you decide to implement Validis at Withum?
I viewed it as a game changer. It was the first time in a long time that I saw a technology that would really change how we audit. I’m an auditor at heart, so I’ve done many many audits over the years. I saw the reports, I saw the technology and I saw it worked.
I said, this is really going to change our margins, our realization and how we collaborate with our clients.
Validis has become an integral part of the Dynamic Audit Solution (DAS) that truly innovates how auditing is done. Helping your firm reach new heights in audit quality, efficiency and value to your clients.
Validis will totally change the way you do auditing forever.
How does Validis enhance the audit preparation process?
We used to do a document request letter, to request financial information from our clients – the same thing we’ve been doing for years at every CPA. We ask for balance sheets income statements, accounts receivable, aging.
With Validis our document request letter went from 5 pages to 2. Why ask for information if you have access to all the data?!
Validis technology is building the information you need around the data. In the past you asked for that information, now you get the data and you build it out yourself.
It’s an absolutely amazing concept and technology.
How has Validis improved the audit process for your auditors?
Our auditors go to the field and day 1 they have a foundational set of audit work papers, for example accounts receivables and aging reports. One of the audit steps is to check subsequent cash collections against that aging report. Think about how easy that would be if you had the data. With Validis you do. A test that would normally take a few hours is immediately complete.
Now we can focus on what auditors really do – we can go in and deep dive and understand the metrics of our clients.
Was it easy to encourage client adoption?
In a word, yes. One of the best features we pulled out of Validis was that we can white-label the technology. Our clients don’t view it as Validis. They view it as Withum Audit Intelligence.
What RoI has Withum achieved by using Validis?
Validis is one of the first technologies where we have immediately increased realization on deployment for every single client that we’ve deployed it on. We had immediate return on our investment day 1. In my experience that is so unlike any other technology in this space today.
What would you tell your industry peers about Validis?
If I’m in an elevator with a bunch of CPAs and they say “What’s the latest and greatest technology that you would recommend we deploy into
practice?” I would say it has to be Validis. Why Validis? Because Validis will totally change the way you do auditing forever.
