Fax Signed Confirmation with airSlate SignNow

Fax signed confirmation

In the old days of paper confirmations, the client would have to write a manual letter, sign it, have the auditor mail it to the bank to be received back to the auditor, in time to issue the audit opinion. Now with electronic confirmations, through Confirmation.com, the client only really receives an email that says that the confirmation is ready to be initiated, a simple two clicks, and the electronic confirmation process is essentially completed. When I think back to the first audit I did in 2008, I had to manage, it was over 150 confirmations for just one client. I did the majority of those confirmations using paper mail, and sending those out in envelopes, and you can imagine the amount of follow-up that was needed for a 150 confirmations. The nice thing was by 2009, I was able to actually send the majority of those 150 confirmations using Confirmation.com, and it added a whole another layer of efficiency to my audit engagement, and I was able now to spend more time on more important things like analytical procedures, and working with the client directly. The Confirmation.com system typically saves a firm about 50% of its staff time in the confirmation section. We basically allow you to be more efficient in your audit, we increase your realization rates, which ultimately means your profits are up, because we took what was a soft cost for you, turned it into a direct cost. Firms are billing our cost through which effectively makes it free, at the same time we're making you more efficient, we're helping ensure and protect you against fraud, but our service really allows you to automate a process that's been very manual and labor intensive for the last hundred years. The audit client prefers an online confirmation because the old way they had to sign a lot of letters to go out, they had to be in the office to send those letters, and then, if something didn't come back, they had to follow up on it for us with the relationship manager. For the audit associate the most important thing for them is to get that response back from, whether the bank, the law firm, or the company AR responder, and get that response into the binder, so that it can be passed on to the manager and partner for review. A lot of times when you're doing confirmations via a manual process, you're waiting for these confirmations to come back in, either via mail or via fax. Sometimes this takes weeks, even months on end, and when your audit report is due, you have to have these confirmations back in order to issue the report. So a lot of times, towards the end of the audit, your senior associates, your managers, your senior managers, even your partners, are checking in with your staff saying, "Hey, where are the confirmations? When are we going to get them back? We need to get this signed off." It's such an easy step in the audit engagement, and yet so much time and energy is placed in trying to get these things back, so we can finish the audit report, get the opinion out, and make the client happy.