We believe workpapers should be prepared the same way across every team in your firm. As firms grow, that can be hard to hold on to, and it’s a challenge we’ve worked through in practice ourselves.

Most firms are split into teams, usually by partner. Over time, each team tends to settle into its own way of preparing workpapers, and sometimes its own tools. That makes it harder to review, resource, report and train across the firm as a whole.

Below are the key reasons we think workpapers should be prepared the same way across a firm, starting with the one we see make the biggest difference.

Staff can work for any manager, and managers can review any job

Most people only formally move teams during a restructure or reshuffle. With the right systems, it can be more fluid than that. If someone is sick or on leave and another team has capacity, that team can step in and help. It’s a more efficient way of working.

When every team prepares workpapers differently, that movement costs time. A manager reviewing a file from another team first has to work out how it’s been put together. A junior picking up someone else’s job has to retrace their steps. We think of this as an interpretation tax, and across a full year it adds up.

A well-run factory applies the same process, again and again. Accounting work involves far more judgement than a production line, but the principle carries over. If every job follows the same structure, you can look across your whole pool of juniors, see who has capacity, and reassign work on that basis rather than on which team someone sits in.

One team’s improvements should lift the whole firm

From our own time in practice, teams rarely drift from the firm standard for bad reasons. A firm agrees on a set of workpapers. A few years later, one team has found a clearer layout, a better way to handle a tricky area, or a check that catches a common error.

Through no fault of their own, that improvement often stays with them. It gets built into their workpapers and never makes its way back to the firm standard.

A consistent approach gives those insights somewhere to go. When the firm standard is updated, every team benefits, not just the one that came up with the idea.

Teams will disagree on how some work should be done, and that’s normal. What helps is a regular forum where teams can raise how they prepare workpapers, talk through the differences, and agree on one way forward for the firm.

Consolidated insights are easier with everything in one place

There are tools that can pull data together from different sources. Still, it’s simpler and more efficient to get a consolidated view of how work is progressing when every team’s workpapers live in one place and follow the same structure.

With that in place, you can see what’s in preparation, what’s waiting on review and what’s finished, across every team and job type, without stitching reports together. Your integrations also have one consistent structure to work with.

Training goes further when everyone works the same way

Firm-wide training gives a better return when the work it covers is done the same way in every team. New starters can be trained once, to one standard, whichever team they join.

It also widens the pool of people who can do the training. A senior from one team can help bring on a new starter in another, because they’re teaching the same process. That saves time for the people training, and new team members become productive sooner.

Different clients, same foundations

Partners often look after different industries and client types, and those clients do need different things. A property developer and a medical practice will call for different reports, reconciliations and supporting documents.

What doesn’t need to differ is the foundation underneath: where workpapers live, the process each job follows, how documents are attached and reviewed, and the technology it all runs on. A shared foundation still leaves each team room to add what their clients need.

How this works in Cimplico Workpapers

We’re a little biased, because we’ve built Cimplico Workpapers around the principles of consistency and efficiency. But we’ve worked in practice ourselves, and we’ve seen these patterns first-hand. That experience shaped how we built it.

In Cimplico Workpapers, every team works from your firm templates: the steps, checks and supporting schedules that set out how you want work done. When a team finds a better approach, you update the firm template once, and every new job reflects it from then on.

Annual compliance, BAS, FBT and ITR jobs all sit in the same system, so you can see progress across every team in one place. And because every job follows the same structure, a manager can pick up a review from any team without first working out how the file was put together.

Start with one firm standard

Your teams will always bring different strengths and client mixes. Consistent workpapers across the firm let you keep those strengths, while making it far easier to report, resource, review and train across every team.

If you’d like to see how firm templates work in practice, you can book a demo of Cimplico Workpapers below.