Overview
When creating the final report, you may need to make customizations to the report template that are specific to the client or engagement. In this tutorial, you’ll create a custom report template for a specific engagement. You’ll also learn how to re-use your template when you roll this engagement forward into next year.
In your engagement, there will be two documents associated with the report. The report template is the document containing the form field tags and sheet tags used to pull specific data for your engagement. The generated report is the document that is finalized into the client deliverable.
Background
Fieldguide can automatically generate reports using templates and leveraging data from form fields and sheets. However, some engagements will require customizations to the report template before generating a report with the appropriate formatting and content specific to the engagement.
These customizations should be made within the report template that is copied to the engagement, so that the template can be leveraged in future years. If the engagement and report template is efficiently configured, changes to dates, controls, system description narratives, and other client data should be updated in the form fields or sheets so that the customized report template can be used to generate the final report automatically in one click.
Before you begin
This tutorial assumes that you already have a report template for your engagement type (i.e. SOC 2 Type II Report Template), and you have prior experience using form fields and sheet data to generate a report.
Steps
Step #1: Copy report template to your engagement
Pull in the appropriate report template for this engagement’s framework. If it’s a SOC 2 engagement, you’ll want to add the SOC 2 report template.
Step #2: Generate a report to see what changes are needed
Generate a report from your template and review it to find places where you need to make modifications.
Don’t make changes to your generated report—make them to the report template instead.
Step #3: Modify your Report Template
You can make your desired customizations to the local copy of the report template. The changes you make to this copy of the template won’t affect the admin copy. The customizations you make are up to you, but here are a few common modifications:
Verify sentence tense and noun possession is correct based on the data coming from the Form fields.
For example, you may have multiple subservice organizations and the template report could be set up with singular sentence tense when referring to subservice organizations.
Or, the client name may end in an s and the report template could be set up to add ‘s at the end of the client name when it should just be an apostrophe (e.g. PDB Enterprises’s is incorrect and should be PDB Enterprises’)
Add client-specific logos, and set their size and layout on the page.
Add text for any report sections that are not being pulled from forms and sheets
Check how paragraphs, headers, and pages break in the generated report, where the actual text is inserted into a form tag or sheet tag.
The actual text may be a different length causing the sentence to extend to another line or changing the spacing of the paragraphs. Using page breaks and formatting tools to make changes should be made to the customized template when those changes will be consistent for this specific client and engagement in future years. These changes may make the template look abnormal but will help make the final report clean and professional.
Step #4: Test your Template
Once you’ve made changes to your template, you’ll want to generate another report to ensure everything looks as you intended. This is also a good time to identify any additional modifications you want to make to your template.
Review generated report for any additional modifications that were not identified when customizing the report template
Regenerate the report to confirm these changes worked as intended. Go through as many iterations as necessary to get the generated report as close to a final copy as possible without needing to make changes to it after it is generated.
Your workflow process should always include a formatting review of the final generated report for changes due to how different length text inserted into form field and sheets impacts the formatting of the report.
Step #5: Save your Customized Report Template and Generated Report
Save the customized report template to a folder in your engagement documents where it can be used again in future years after rolling forward the engagement.
If there are specific changes required to the generated report, make a note using Word comments in the customized report template, so you and your team know these are required for future years.
Do not delete the client/engagement-specific template from the engagement.
Follow your firm’s quality procedures to ensure the appropriate sign offs are included on the template so it can be retained in the workpapers of the engagement.
Summary
In this tutorial, you learned how to:
Customize a report template to meet client-specific needs
Configure a customized report template for re-usability in future engagements
Next steps
Consider following these guides to learn about working your engagement and using additional time-saving features in Fieldguide: