Stop chasing confirmations
5 minute read
Do your audits have a stretch where your work is stalled because of unanswered confirmations? Sending requests by email, fax, mail, or through other platforms that don’t have a dedicated team following up on outstanding requests can result in frustrating delays. You’ve likely sent the requests, followed up yourself with banks, and are still left wondering if responses will arrive in time. That uncertainty is hard to plan around, and it puts pressure on your team, your clients, and your deadlines.
Confirmations can feel like a waste of time if you don’t get a response. The Confirmation platform exists to change that.
Here are five benefits you’ll see with our guaranteed response promise:
1. Less babysitting, more output.
Every follow-up email, phone call, and status check is time spent on a request that may still go unanswered. Those hours rarely show up in the audit plan, and they often go to redundant re-checks that used to eat up billable hours.
When you send requests through Confirmation, it goes to a validated financial institution in our network, and every in-network request is backed by a guarantee: you will receive a response.
We follow up on outstanding requests on the auditor’s behalf, so you don’t have to spend your time chasing replies, and your audit isn’t held up while you wait for definitive audit evidence.
That matters most when work is heaviest. We know that after a fiscal year ends, confirmations are just one of many audit steps demanding your attention. Confirmation helps turn a weeks-long wait into an operation win, so your team can move at the speed of busy season.
2. Real data, zero guesswork.
Confirmation enables positive confirmations, where the institution responds with the balance or confirms the information you requested. Negative confirmations, which only require a reply if something is wrong, only create more uncertainty. A positive response is direct evidence of your client’s financial position, and every response in Confirmation comes from a validated source, so your findings hold up under the spotlight.
That evidence also helps you spot inconsistencies between what a client reports and what the bank confirms. Those gaps can point to fraud, or to a business taking on risks it may not have fully disclosed. Catching them early protects your firm’s reputation.
3. Your paper trail talks back at peer review.
Peer review only comes around every three years, but the documentation bar keeps rising. A complete, positive response trail is your protection. When peer reviewers or inspectors ask how you obtained your evidence, you can show a documented, validated response for every request, rather than reconstructing a history from scattered emails and forwarded faxes.
Every confirmation sent through Confirmation is logged and easy to trace, start to finish. There’s no scrambling to reconstruct what happened on an engagement months later from emails and screenshots.
Airtight compliance means zero stress. Confirmation is designed around the AICPA, PCAOB, and ISA standards you’re held to. You can review how the platform addresses each standard on our compliance page.
4. One platform for all your requests.
Bank confirmations are only part of the picture. Your audit may also require legal, accounts receivable and payable, EBP and 401(k), and private equity confirmations. Handling each one through a different platform, email thread, or process means switching between workflows, logins, and formats. Every switch costs time and opens the door to mistakes and organizational problems, such as a request sent to the wrong place, a response filed under the wrong client, or a deadline missed because it lived in a different system.
Confirmation is built to handle a full portfolio of engagements and confirmation requests running side by side, not one at a time. In short: busy season doesn’t have to mean chaos.
Confirmation has the largest global network, which amplifies your time savings and keeps you working in one platform. Our network includes more than 4,300 financial institutions and departments, spanning 170 countries. Whatever banks your clients use, you can send and track those requests from the same platform you use for everything else.
If you don’t see your financial institution in our platform, we encourage you to send an out-of-network request. As a bonus, our team regularly reviews out-of-network requests and contacts those banks about joining the Confirmation network.
5. Your clients’ data stays secure, and audits keep moving
Client financial information is sensitive, and it deserves strong protection. Confirmation encrypts signatures, attachments, and completed confirmation documents with AES-256 encryption. We undergo two Service Organization Control (SOC) examinations every year and hold an ISO 27001 certification for the Confirmation service. Every party is validated before using the platform, and only the authorized signer can sign a confirmation, which helps reduce fraud risk. Learn more about our security.
Client account information can also roll over from year to year within the same protected system, so you aren’t re-entering or re-sharing it every engagement, and completion markers stay clear.
A slow-to-respond client on one engagement doesn’t have to stall progress on the others already in Confirmation. Your clients don’t have to create an account to sign an authorization. There’s no setup to walk through and no new login to manage each year. Their information moves through the process while their work keeps moving forward.
Work smarter, stay compliant, and sleep at night.
Client retention, staff retention, and firm profitability all trace back to the same thing: engagements that finish on time, hold up under peer review, and don’t burn out the team, all easier with Confirmation running underneath.
Sign in to your Confirmation account to pick up where you left off. Or, create a free account in just a few minutes and send your first confirmation with a guaranteed response.