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Deloitte: Faster from trial balance to annual report

Client

Deloitte

Industry

Audit and advisory

Services

Platform- and API architecture

UX/UI Design

30,000 annual reports a year, and every minute counts

Deloitte prepares between 30,000 and 40,000 annual reports and tax returns every year. At that volume, even small time savings on each report add up to a significant effect.

For seven years, Deloitte produced the reports in an in-house application. It worked well when it was new, but it had become outdated. The processes were complex, mostly manual and slow.

A system only a few people could handle

The system wasn't beginner-friendly, so learning it took time and effort. It also depended on a few people. That created bottlenecks in development work and was a real business risk.

The goal for a new solution was clear: less time spent preparing reports and developing new report types, shorter training, and better use of the large amounts of data the reports contain.

The numbers behind FACT

30,000+annual reports and tax returns a year
30minfor an auditor to learn the system, down from a full day
800auditors, roughly, got FACT without central training

"The launch of FACT has been a big success in our business. Our auditors had been looking forward to a new, future-proof system, and it has been surprisingly easy to onboard our employees to the new application. This is largely down to the very intuitive interface and navigation, and our focus on self-learning has also paid off."

Christian Lehmann Nielsen

Partner, Audit Innovation & Transformation Leader, Deloitte Denmark

What Deloitte gets out of FACT

The system writes the first draft

Preparing a report used to be manual and very time-consuming, especially for new clients. In the new solution, FACT, a team of specialists has "trained" the system to choose the relevant content based on the figures in the chart of accounts.

So the system writes a draft of the report based on the Danish Financial Statements Act, the way the specialist team has taught it. The algorithms improve over time (supervised learning).

Fast, and what you see is what you get

FACT runs in the browser, and load time was an important KPI. Generation time had to go, so the reports are always updated live. Along the way, we examined the reporting process itself to find out where the biggest gains were.

The auditor keeps working in an advanced editor, where the finished PDF gets exactly the same page breaks and hyphenation as on screen. Reminders and warnings act as a built-in check that the accounts are prepared correctly and comply with rules and legislation. And the large amounts of data can be accessed centrally and used across the business.

From a one-day course to 30 minutes

It used to take a full day of training to learn how to prepare a report. In end-to-end testing of FACT, an auditor learned it in 30 minutes. That's why Deloitte rolled the application out to around 800 auditors without central training. Instead, they got a set of self-service learning videos.

With FACT, employees without special IT skills can create new report types themselves. And Deloitte was already seeing a noticeable reduction in the time it takes to produce annual reports and tax returns.