In CPA firms, peer review is a process where one firm brings in an independent, qualified reviewer — typically a member of another firm — to evaluate its work. It's essentially an audit of the auditors, to ensure the firm's work meets professional standards and safeguards public trust.

In Fieldguide, there are multiple ways to grant a peer reviewer secure, limited access to your engagement data. Here are the two main options:

Create a firm user account for the peer reviewer to grant them direct access to Fieldguide. Follow these steps:

You can use role and permission settings to limit peer reviewers' access to firm and engagement data. If this is your firm's first time setting up an account for a peer reviewer, an admin should follow the steps below for configuring role and permission options before creating the user's account.

Consider archiving the engagement before you add a peer reviewer. You can use the archiving utilities to delete all comments and old document versions.

The level of access that a firm user has to Fieldguide is determined by their role and permissions. Before creating a peer reviewer account for the first time, admins should configure the desired role and permission settings for this type of user. After that, you can re-use these settings for any new peer reviewer accounts you create.

Every user account has a role that determines their baseline access to Fieldguide. For peer reviewers, we recommend using a non-admin role, such as the default "Firm Member" role (which has the most limited permissions of the default roles), or creating a custom "Peer Reviewer" role with all optional permissions disabled. For more on roles, see Firm permissions and roles.

Engagement permissions control what features a user can access inside an engagement that they are a member of. When you add a non-admin user to an engagement, you'll need to select an engagement permission. Admins can configure engagement permissions with custom names and access levels. For more info, see Configure engagement permissions.

For peer reviewers, we recommend creating an engagement permission named "Peer Reviewer" with these settings:

If you prefer not to give a peer reviewer direct access to Fieldguide, export the engagement binder as a ZIP file and share it with the peer reviewer. The export includes all documents, sheets, reports, and a log of files with last modified dates and sign-offs.