From Paper to Cloud: Gruenloh Hardy & Associates' Transformation and Success with Cloud Audit Suite

Challenge: Reimagining audits with new technology

“Our firm’s CEO, Wayne Gruenloh, has been in practice for close to 50 years. The other three partners all specialize and oversee different areas of the business. I manage the assurance services. Our audit assurance department consists of five staff members, and we serve between 30 to 35 audit customers annually as of 2019. The department wanted to go paperless, collect all our data in one place, increase the efficiency of our work, and reduce the stress of working remotely. We now have grown to serve between 55 to 60 annually, adding only one additional full-time personnel as of 2022,” said Collena.

Solution: The right technology at the right time

“We started using the Cloud Audit Suite after tax season in 2019. We did our training, then started in July, so we’ve just hit out three-year mark. It’s been the right move for us, and we did all that in 2019, pre-COVID.

“We started with Engagement Manager (previously AdvanceFlow) first, then later added GoFileRoom. We were just going to continue to use File Cabinet but then we went through a firm merger and needed to look at how to optimize software utilization. That’s also when we went to a virtual office with all our products from Thomson Reuters. Now all departments use GoFileRoom and our firm is entirely cloud-based.

“We utilized the full value of Cloud Audit Suite during the COVID-19 pandemic and that plays into our success story and happiness with the tools. Because we implemented Cloud Audit Suite when we did, we came through COVID, not behind like all the other firms in our area who did not use cloud-based programs. We have even seen about 30% growth.

“I’m doing proposals left and right because we’re seeing clients that are not happy because their work is so far behind — things of that nature — it’s more of a reaction at this point - and we are able to take on more capacity.”

“Before Cloud Audit Suite we were still very manual and using multiple software, so you had your software for trial balance, separate PPC documents in SMART Practice Aids, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets — all of which would get printed and put in a binder.

“The partner would manually sign off on everything and after some time, the whole big audit binder would end up being three to four 2” binders that would be manually scanned in. None of the software was cloud-based and none of them talked to each other. Not to mention that we would have to be down a lot for software upgrades and data maintenance. Now we do not have to do any of that anymore.”