Softline Pastel, South Africa's leading provider of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) accounting and business solutions, has brought to market a product, Pastel Auditor, designed specifically to save auditors time and money.
"Developing a product for auditors was a natural step in the evolution of our product set and of our strategic determination to go beyond accounting," says Pastel managing director Steven Cohen. "Having provided accounting solutions for most industries during the past 18 years, we were already in possession of the technology tools that auditors would find helpful in extracting and analysing information from a set of financial accounts.
"Specifically, the kinds of automated, integrated processes that our accounting solutions deliver now are ideally suited to the modern approach to auditing that focuses on analytical review - identifying trends and then auditing by exception.
"So, we designed Pastel Auditor to give auditors an immediate overview of the status of the business - enabling them to very quickly get a grip on the underlying issues. A graphical view of a client's business allows users to instantly see the wood for the trees. In fact, the whole process of drawing up working papers and extracting information from the business is effectively reduced from days or weeks to minutes or hours.
"Auditors can then use very comprehensive report and drill-down capabilities to examine the transactions behind the issues. Again, this speeds up the audit process. In fact, we believe that Pastel Auditor saves auditors 15 minutes in every audit hour."
Auditor intuitively draws information from the Pastel Accounting products, and journal entries passed in Auditor are automatically and seamlessly updated back into the accounting products. Audit information in Pastel Auditor is displayed in an Excel format that is customisable to suit an auditing firm's individual needs.
"A particular advantage is that once you have extracted information from a Pastel accounting package into Pastel Auditor, you can work on the spreadsheets without being connected to the source of the information," Cohen says. "In other words, you have absolute flexibility about where and how you perform the audit. You can even do it from your deck chair on your annual holiday."
Designed in conjunction with a firm of chartered accountants, Pastel Auditor has been kept easy to use and focused on facilitating the activities of auditors of SMEs.
"In essence, we've taken auditing best practices as they apply to SMEs and automated them - allowing auditors to give priority time to thinking about their clients' businesses rather than collecting their clients' data," Cohen says.
Pastel will also establish an Auditor Web site on which users will be kept up-to-date on regulatory changes, and where templates, updates and other material applicable to specific industries will be made available.
Pastel Auditor features include the ability to edit the financial statement template to suit the particulars of each client. The changes are then "remembered" by Pastel Auditor for the subsequent years' audit.
Trend analysis can be done at general ledger level, with prior and current year balances available at the click of a button. Drill-down facilities allow access to month-by-month transactions.
Notes to the financial statement are generated automatically by Pastel Auditor and can be further interrogated by clicking on the relevant item to reveal the detail behind the note.
A full set of lead schedules can be extracted by clicking on the item in the financial statements. A transactional-level drill down facility is included.
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