Overview
A financial audit engagement involves multiple stages, including setting up a trial balance, mapping accounts, making adjustments, and issuing a report. Fieldguide has multiple purpose-built features to streamline the process.
This guide covers the key elements of financial audit engagements:
Set up your firm's chart of accounts.
Create a trial balance sheet.
Add and manage adjustments.
Link accounts and update mappings.
Create statements and issue a report.
Follow along to learn how to set up a financial audit engagement.
Set up your firm-wide framework and templates
Before your firm can create financial audit engagements, you'll need to have a financial audit framework inside your firm-level frameworks. A financial audit framework provides the standard account names and layout for the chart of accounts (CoA), which is a list of accounts organized by category.
It's important to use the same CoA format over time to allow for accurate period-to-period comparisons. The CoA provides the section headers and standard account mappings for the trial balance sheets and financial statements used in client engagements.
After the framework is added, your firm's admins can set up templates for financial audit engagements. Templates can be used to quickly set up engagements with a standard layout. Here are some suggestions to help you get started:
Financial audit template checklist |
✅ Set up a sheet template for your lead sheet. Populate the lead sheet with the standard columns that you plan on using. |
✅ Set up an engagement template for financial audit engagements. Pre-populate it with any sheets, folders and files, forms, or other elements that you need for financial audit engagements. |
✅ Set up a financial statement template for your standard statement types, like Balance Sheets or Statements of Operations. |
✅ Set up a report template with mail merge tags that pull from financial statements and form fields. |
✅ Set up a form template for client information, statement footnotes, or other data. |
Once your firm-wide framework and templates are set up, move on to the next step to set up a financial audit engagement for a client.
Set up your client's engagement and trial balance
Create the financial audit engagement either from a template or from scratch. Then, set up the client's trial balance sheet. A trial balance is a summary of all the client's financial accounts, showing their balances at a specific point in time. The setup process involves importing the client's accounts and values, and mapping the client's actual accounts to the groups from your firm's financial audit framework.
If you don't have a trial balance ready yet but want to proceed with the engagement setup, you can set up the trial balance with placeholder values. You can replace the trial balance with the updated version later.
After the setup is complete, move on to the next step to dive deeper into managing and analyzing your trial balance.
Working inside the trial balance
With your trial balance sheet in place, it’s time to enhance and fine-tune your financial data to make sure it paints an accurate picture. In the next steps, we'll dive deeper into managing and analyzing your trial balance, which serves as the backbone of your financial audit engagement.
You can perform these tasks at any time during your engagement, as needed:
Add adjustments to a trial balance. Adjustments are used to account for changes that occur after the initial recording of transactions, such as corrections or year-end closing entries. Make adjustments to ensure that your trial balance accurately reflects the financial reality of your client's accounts.
Update account mappings in a trial balance. Account mappings link your financial accounts to categories or classifications required for financial reporting, such as revenue, expenses, or assets. Accurate mapping ensures that your financial statements meet compliance and reporting standards.
Display column aggregates on a trial balance. Aggregating data allows you to view account totals for each section in your chart of accounts at a glance. This feature is especially helpful when analyzing trends.
Adding and managing data
Over the course of a financial audit engagement, you may need to add additional data or make changes to your existing setup. This this section focuses on the tools and processes that help you expand and manage your data effectively.
You can perform these tasks at any time during your engagement, as needed:
Add another trial balance: To manage engagements across multiple reporting periods or analyze the current trial balance against a prior period, add another trial balance to your engagement for each timeframe. Additional trial balances can also be used for adding budgets or uploading interim trial balances.
Add financial accounts to another sheet: You may find it helpful to manage financial accounts across multiple sheets to organize and analyze the data effectively. For example, your firm's standard may be to have data organized into separate sheets for different purposes, like analytical procedures or lead sheets. To do this, you can connect the financial accounts from your trial balance to another sheet.
Replace a trial balance: You may want to replace the trial balance sheet if you previously uploaded a preliminary trial balance and the client has provided an updated version.
Create a financial statement and generate a report
Create a financial statement either from a template or from scratch. Statements are customizable compilations of financial data designed for reporting in financial audit engagements, like Balance Sheets or Statements of Operations. Both the trial balance and financial statements are based on the same underlying data—the client’s accounting data. While the trial balance is a raw list of accounts and balances, financial statements allow you to organize and categorize these accounts into customized line items and sections for reporting.
Reporting works the same way everywhere in Fieldguide:
Set up a report template that includes financial statements. Admins should consider adding a firm-wide report template for financial audit.
Add the report template to your engagement. Once a report template has been added at the admin level, it's easy for the audit team to pull it into any engagement.
Generate the report from the template.
Next steps
Explore all our help center articles on financial audit.