Case study
Modernizing nonprofit and government audits with CoCounsel Audit
See how Robert St. Pierre’s firm improved audit speed, accuracy, and consistency for nonprofit and government clients using Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Audit.
Introduction and executive summary
Robert St. Pierre is the owner and CEO of a small CPA firm based in Stilwell, Oklahoma. The team includes two CPAs, several staff members, and one candidate preparing for CPA certification.
The firm has been operating for over 25 years, primarily serving non-profit organizations and small governments with audits. The firm also has a tax practice for personal, business, and 990 preparation. Currently, the firm performs about 80 audits per year. Robert emphasizes the importance of technology adoption to improve efficiency. The small firm is particularly interested in tools that deliver efficiency and accuracy while reducing manual review time.
“Anything that makes me do a better job, faster job, more efficient, I'm all about it.”
Robert St. Pierre
Owner & CEO, Robert St. Pierre, CPA
Rapid analysis
Review 750‑page documents in minutes
Self‑serve research
Eliminate the need to call to other CPAs
Flexible templates
Customize templates to fit your workflow
Robert’s firm adopted Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Audit and Accounting to enhance audit processes and finds it particularly helpful in streamlining governmental and non-profit engagements. While CoCounsel has delivered significant benefits, Robert identified opportunities for improvement and shared constructive feedback — most notably regarding the Governmental Entities Board Minutes template — leading to a collaborative optimization effort with the customer success team at Thomson Reuters.
Challenges and solutions
The governmental entities board minutes template
When it comes to audit documentation, governmental board minutes and audit reports involve complex details that demand thorough review, often leading to repetitive and time-consuming processes. This is where templates can prove useful, and while Robert sees strong potential in the board minutes template, he has highlighted areas for refinement, namely:
- Too many questions, irrelevant details, and repetitive summaries
- Lack of chronological ordering, which makes it harder to track items like grants or projects appearing under multiple unrelated questions
Robert states that "We’ve been using the Governmental Entities Board Minutes template on every engagement. The whole point of a board minute summary is to summarize, and we're not summarizing."
Joseph Bryant, Customer Success Manager for CoCounsel, engaged with Robert to address his feedback and improve his CoCounsel experience. Joseph’s guidance included:
- Customizing templates using prompts. Adding prompt instructions achieves the desired organization and formatting — for example:
- Present findings in chronological order by meeting date.
- Provide concise summaries in the form of three or less bullet points per meeting.
- Saving modified templates. After customizing, save as a new, personalized template — for individual use or firmwide sharing — to standardize best practices.
- Handling missing information succinctly. To avoid verbose outputs when data is absent, include “If information is missing, respond ‘N/A’.”
- Optimizing document processing for accuracy. CoCounsel summarizes document sections before deeper analysis. Accuracy improves when prompts identify specific sections. For example, “Focus on board minutes from Jan–Dec 2025, agenda items and attachments.”
The firm applied Joseph's recommendations to customize and streamline this template in practice, and also shares other product feedback with editorial and product teams for evaluation.
Innovation opportunity: Missing financial statement disclosures
Robert proposed a new template that reads financial statements to identify missing or incomplete disclosures. Joseph shared that another firm achieved a similar outcome by referencing a knowledge base of existing financials and disclosures — an approach Robert’s team can mirror:
- Use firm-approved disclosure lists and prior audited statements as references.
- Prompt CoCounsel to flag absent disclosures and suggest additions aligned with the reference set.
When to use conversations and workspaces
Robert uses CoCounsel regularly, using a mixture of the Conversations, Templates, and Workspaces features. He sees Conversations as an effective way to start with questions and get a natural follow-up, noting that "Instead of calling another CPA, now I just throw the questions in there and the follow-up questions are awesome."
The customer success team advises that the Conversations feature excels at rapid research, drafting, and complex multistep prompts, whereas the Workspaces feature is best for structured data extraction across documents.
Templates are used for structured checks and heavy lifting. The firm relies on templates that reconcile financial statement numbers and analyze complex agreements:
- Disclosures Reconciliation template
Robert explains, “It takes all the numbers in the footnotes, compares them to the financial statements, tells you if you're even a dollar off, and I love it.”
- Debt Agreement Analysis template
Robert says "I fed a 750-page bond indenture into that thing and in three or four minutes I had a report."
Outcomes
CoCounsel Audit is delivering measurable efficiency and quality improvements in nonprofit and government audits. The firm reports:
- Time savings. The audit team can complete reconciliation work faster and analyze large volumes of documents more efficiently than before.
- Better error detection. The workflow reduces the risk of mistakes that can come from manual copy-and-paste steps, and it helps surface discrepancies earlier in the audit process.
- Confidence and consistency. The team can validate audit decisions more reliably, which leads to more consistent judgments and greater confidence in their conclusions.
- Self-service knowledge. Staff can use the Conversations feature to find nuanced answers more quickly, without waiting on a specific subject-matter expert.
“The primary benefit so far is looking up questions and finding good answers.”
Robert St. Pierre
Owner & CEO, Robert St. Pierre, CPA
Robert envisions continuing to use CoCounsel to deliver efficiencies and time savings while reducing process bottlenecks.
At a glance