For growing accounting firms, workpapers are rarely just workpapers.

They sit at the centre of review, training, client service, management accounts, journals and team collaboration. When those workpapers live across Excel files, SharePoint folders, email trails and individual ways of working, the admin can quickly become a burden.

That was one of the challenges facing PEM, a Cambridge-based accounting firm with a team of around 50 people. Roughly 40 of those team members routinely prepare or review management accounts, outputs or accounting journals that require supporting working papers.

Before trialling Active, PEM’s process was built around Excel working papers, manual journals and SharePoint file storage. It worked, but it depended on people preparing files in a consistent way, storing them correctly, keeping them up to date, and making sure the latest version was always easy to find.

For a growing team, that created two clear challenges: maintaining consistency across different preparers and reviewers, and keeping everything in one reliable place.

The challenge: consistency across a growing team

Like many training firms, PEM has people joining, learning and progressing while preparing accounts. Newer team members often learn by following what someone else has shown them, or by opening a previous file and copying the approach used there.

That can lead to small variations from file to file.

One preparer may include information in a slightly different way. Another may miss something that is considered good practice. A reviewer may then need to spend extra time bringing the file back into line with the firm’s preferred approach.

PEM had explored templating in Excel, but maintaining those templates created its own challenge. Someone had to build them, manage them, update them and keep them working. That either required dedicated resource or took people away from chargeable work.

Active offered a more structured way forward.

With managed templates, standardised workflows and a familiar Excel-based environment, Active gave PEM a way to reduce the admin burden of maintaining everything manually while still supporting the way accountants already work.

The challenge: keeping one source of truth

PEM was also managing workpapers through SharePoint. Again, the issue was not that SharePoint could not store the files. The issue was that the process depended on every person storing every file in the right place, in the right structure, and keeping the latest version live.

When work is moving quickly, that creates friction.

People need to know where the current file is. Reviewers need confidence that they are looking at the right version. Prior-period decisions need to be traced. Client communication needs to be checked. Emails need to be found. And all of that assumes everything has been filed properly in the first place.

For PEM, the cost of that process came down to time.

The more the firm grows, the more valuable it becomes to have one place where the work, comments, queries, review notes and prior-period context can sit together.

Why PEM chose to trial Active

PEM had been thinking about a workpaper solution for a couple of years as the firm grew. The team had trialled another solution previously, but it had not been the right fit.

With Active, the difference was the balance between structure and flexibility.

PEM works with a changing client base, including startups and growing businesses around the Cambridge area. That means the team may need to create a set of management accounts quickly for a client that has not needed them before.

Because the vast majority of PEM’s clients are on Xero, Active’s direct Xero connection was particularly relevant. The team could link the client file, use existing templates, and create a consistent set of workpapers more quickly than starting from scratch in a disconnected spreadsheet process.

That mattered because consistency cannot come at the expense of speed.

For a deadlines-led firm, any new system needs to support the pace of client work. It needs to be easy enough for the team to adopt, structured enough to improve quality, and flexible enough to handle real client scenarios.

Supporting faster, more consistent accounts work

For PEM, the workpaper challenge is closely tied to the wider accounts process.

The team is not just creating files for the sake of documentation. They are preparing management accounts, accounting journals and other outputs that need clear supporting evidence behind them. When those workings are inconsistent, difficult to locate or separated from the wider review trail, it affects more than the workpaper file. It affects the speed and confidence of the accounts process too.

This is especially important for PEM’s client base. The firm works with a lot of startups and growing businesses around Cambridge, where client needs can change quickly. A client may not have needed management accounts before, then suddenly require a clear set of workings and outputs to be turned around quickly.

Active helps by giving the team a more structured starting point. Rather than building a file from scratch each time, PEM can connect the client’s Xero data, use existing templates and prepare a consistent set of workings that supports the accounts process from the beginning.

That consistency matters for preparers, but it also matters for reviewers.

When the supporting work, comments, prior-period context and review trail are held together, the team can move through the accounts process with fewer questions about where things are, what was done before or whether the right evidence has been included.

It gives PEM a clearer route from client data, to workpapers, to review, to the final accounts output.

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The early “aha” moment: visibility in minutes

Although PEM is still early in its Active rollout, one moment made the value clear.

On one job, several people had been involved in preparing different months, while more than one reviewer had been involved across the same period. When a question came up around a particular issue, the team needed to check how it had been handled previously.

Before Active, that would have meant finding the previous set of workings in SharePoint, searching through separate email storage, locating the relevant email trail, and relying on everything having been filed correctly.

With Active, Charlie was able to move from the current month to the previous month in seconds. The team could then see the relevant section, who prepared it, who reviewed it, what comments had been made, what conversation had taken place, and what resolution had been reached.

“It was all there in front of us.”

That visibility changed the conversation.

Instead of spending time reconstructing what had happened, the team could quickly understand the prior treatment and move forward with more confidence.

For growing firms, that kind of visibility is not only useful for one client or one month. It becomes more valuable as more people, more clients and more review points are involved.

Early benefits: roll-forward, support and adoption

PEM is still in the early phase of using Active, but the team has already started to see how the platform can support a more consistent way of working. In particular, repeat-month files and roll-forward functionality are beginning to show their value. Once a file has been set up and carried into the next period, the team has a clearer structure to work from, rather than rebuilding or rechecking the same elements each time.

That early progress has been supported by the Active team throughout implementation. PEM has had access to a live Teams channel where they can raise questions, work through setup queries and get quick responses as the platform becomes part of their day-to-day process.

That support matters because adoption is often where software projects succeed or fail. For PEM, the value of Active is not simply that it uses Excel. It is that it keeps the familiarity of Excel while adding the structure, control, standardisation and functionality needed to make workpapers easier to manage across a growing team.

That matters because the adoption of software marks its success

For PEM, the value of Active is not simply that it uses Excel. It is that it keeps the familiarity of Excel while adding structure, control, standardisation and functionality around it.

As Charlie explained, calling Active “Excel-based working papers” does it a disservice. Accountants will always like spreadsheets, but Active adds the control, workflow and visibility needed to make them work better across a firm.

The takeaway: flexibility and control

When asked to summarise his experience with Active so far, Charlie described it as:

“The perfect combination of flexibility and control.”

That is the balance many accounting firms are looking for.

Rigid systems can be difficult to roll out across a busy team. Pure Excel processes can be flexible, but hard to standardise and control. Active sits between those two worlds, giving firms a familiar working environment with the structure needed to improve consistency, visibility and review.

For PEM, the journey is still in progress. But the early signs are promising.

Active is helping the team move away from disconnected files and manual processes, without forcing them into an unfamiliar way of working. It gives them a structured system they can start using quickly, while still allowing the firm to build out a more standardised process over time.

For growing firms that want more consistency, better visibility and less admin around workpapers, that is a strong place to start.

See how Active could work for your firm

Want to standardise workpapers, speed up accounts, reduce manual admin and keep every conversation in one place?

Book a demo with Active.

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