Introduction to CaseWare Cloud for users

Index Before you start, where to find all the resources you need ................................................................... 3

CaseWare Cloud in a nutshell ................................................................................................................ 4

The building blocks of CaseWare Cloud ................................................................................................. 4

Understanding user roles in CaseWare Cloud – Who will do what during an engagement ..................... 5

Knowing the difference between CaseWare Cloud Features, Applications and Tools ............................ 7

No need to send emails - Communicate with the chatter function ...................................................... 12

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Before you start, where to find all the resources you need

This guide is aimed to give you a basic understanding of how CaseWare Cloud is designed to enhance your work processes. Be sure to also follow the CaseWare Cloud Getting Started journey on the CaseWare Africa Success Community to get a carefully structured and comprehensive list of content pieces to help you upskill on a wide variety of subjects. Below is a great introduction video you also find there.

Click here to play our community introduction video

Access the CaseWare Cloud Getting Started Journey where you will find this guide and so much more. To access the community, go to http://success.casewareafrica.com (follow the instructions below):

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CaseWare Cloud in a nutshell

CaseWare Cloud gives any auditor/Tax Practitioner/Company Secretariat a new way to collaborate when working on their Engagements and it gives you a better experience when working on CaseWare Working Papers. It combines a series of collaborative web applications for your day-to- day internal interactions and for external communications. Now you can upload your working papers files, store all your supporting documents online, keep track of your issues/findings and complete tasks all in one secure place.

Cloud can integrate with CaseWare Working Papers and CaseWare Time so that you can synchronise engagement data to the Cloud for further analysis and monitoring. The growing number of apps available on CaseWare Cloud ensures that your firm will always have access to the latest tools and gadgets to serve your business needs.

The building blocks of CaseWare Cloud

CaseWare Cloud eliminates the need to duplicate efforts. This not only saves you time but it also increases your ability to achieve a level of data accuracy that is normally lost when maintaining multiple data sets for your clients.

Click here to play our video entitled

“A basic introduction and navigation of CaseWare Cloud”

When working on CaseWare Cloud, you will begin with the creation of Entities, Staff, Contacts and Groups. CaseWare Cloud needs these elements to be set up before it can help you to integrate and simplify any of your engagements as this is where your core source data begins. The setting up of your firm’s instance of CaseWare Cloud needs to be done by your firm administrator. Watch the below webinars to help you understand how your Administrator will do this as this because you will often be required to provide your client detail to help with the setup.

Getting the most out of CaseWare Cloud | Setting up your instance

Getting the most out of Cloud | Integration and Collaboration

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Below is a basic illustration that helps you understand not only the building blocks, and interdependencies between Entities, Groups and the various roles that are assigned to people working on Engagements. Everything is underpinned by Tools, Applications, Features and Security protocols to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Understanding user roles in CaseWare Cloud – Who will do what during an engagement

CaseWare Cloud is designed to give you a secure online portal to improve the efficiencies of your Audit Engagements. This is only possible through the understanding and managing of various user profiles.

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Data source feature What is it and how is it applied?

Everything begins with an Entity. They are essentially the workspaces where everything in CaseWare Cloud happens. People who are staff members at a firm or contacts of a firm are associated to various entities to provide a common workspace where they can share and manage information about a specific Engagement.

All your Applications like CloudSec, Time, CloudTax, IASE Attestation, Activities and Files are also associated to a single entity within the system.

Staff will be users of CaseWare Cloud that are members of your firm and represent your clients. You can individually create them and manage their profile access or your administrator can do a bulk import. Some staff can see only certain clients and others can see everything depending on your preference. Staff are associated with an entity but do not require full access to the system. A staff member can store files for an engagement in CaseWare Cloud or include it in a client file in CaseWare Working Papers later.

Contacts are normally your clients or people that are external to your firm that need to provide you with input. Contacts could be someone in the client’s organisation that needs to provide you with information (comments or documents) or someone that needs to log in and sign something off. Permissions are also customisable where contacts can be limited to what they are able to see and not. People can be added as contacts for the team to share messages and files in a secure environment. The future of auditing is paperless, and CaseWare Cloud now enables you to do just that.

Groups help you to manage the permissions across your teams and contacts. Groups can be a combination of Staff, Contacts and Contacts. The Introduction to CaseWare Cloud video explains this element nicely.

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Knowing the difference between CaseWare Cloud Features, Applications and Tools

CaseWare Cloud is equipped with Standard Features that help enhance the experience and efficiency of your Audit Engagement (Like our dashboard). Applications are purpose built for specific functions and they are normally purchased separately (Similar to applications on your smartphone). Tools are standard elements to help you manage settings, appearances etc. Let’s unpack each of them in more detail.

Feature What is it?

CaseWare Cloud gives you a chronological timeline where you can view all the activity that has taken place on your Firm’s instance of CaseWare Cloud. This gives credible visibility to teams that sometimes need to work in separate locations. You can instantly gauge progress made on certain engagements as it immediately alerts you to certain tasks that have been completed by a certain staff member, contact or group on a specific audit engagement.

This is a shortcut where you can quickly view or create a new Discussions, Task or File Request. You can filter Activities by Entity so that you do not have to sift through multiple layers to get the information you need.

Having all your Files for an Engagement in the Cloud not only gives you a credible portfolio of auditable supporting documents, but it gives you the ability to manage information far more effectively for that Entity (i.e. your client). A good example could be that of an Identity Document. Now the client only needs to provide it once allowing you to use it every time it is required (Because your Cloud instance is your central source of data).

That saves you time and eliminates the need to continuously ask clients for the same information over and over. It is also not stored on a local server or someone’s computer. CaseWare Cloud and the information you save there is accessible anytime, anywhere.

Here you can get a bird’s eye view on all your audit engagements across Entities, Staff and or Contacts. This is aimed to act as a productivity enhancer to help you get access to what it is you need quicker and with less clicks.

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Entities are the workspaces. You will create an Entity for each client once off and then associate your staff and contacts to it. Then work can begin on every Engagement every year. As long as you remember the building blocks explained earlier on, you will know that any Audit Engagement starts with an Entity. If your client’s organisation is called Jo’s Hamburger Stand, then that will be the name of the Entity.

These are your Audit Managers and or Article Clerks that will work on the Engagements. You can even manage permissions between staff so that information access is well controlled.

Clients are your contacts and it will contain not only all their contact details but it will enable you to ask them to provide information, input or sign off electronically via CaseWare Cloud. This is where tasks are very useful. No more emails, simply create the contact, associate to the Entity and do all interactions from within Cloud.

For larger engagements, there is sometimes a need for a group of people (Staff or Contacts) to receive communications for a specific Entity (Client for which the audit is being performed). This reduces the need for erroneous emails.

Use the dashboard to get an overview of all the activity that is taking place across your Engagements. This helps you to ascertain progress and activities quickly and easily without the need to spend a lot of time monitoring your team’s progress.

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Application What is it?

CloudSec is an Application developed by CaseWare Africa to help automate all your Secretarial processes that are often time consuming and incredibly hard to maintain from a compliance point of view. All your client data is drawn from CaseWare Cloud’s Entity, Staff and Contacts and Groups information therefore eliminating the need to maintain a separate data set for all your Secretarial clients.

This application is another powerful application developed by CaseWare Africa that enables any Firm to submit and manage their bulk tax submissions to the South African receiver of revenue. It is now possible to do bulk submissions anytime, anywhere as long as you have an Internet Connection. All your data is safely stored on CaseWare Cloud and all your client data is drawn from CaseWare Cloud’s Entity, Staff and Contacts and Groups information.

Attestation engagements are very specialised and highly regulated, such as Attorneys Trust Accounts and Estate Agent Trust Accounts. It is designed to be user friendly and intuitive to minimize the amount of documents to be completed whilst keeping all your information comprehensive and online. The intuitive methodology gives you a predefined workflow that enables you to complete engagements faster and with the confidence that risks are minimised.

If your firm uses CaseWare Q in conjunction with the Audit template for Working Papers, you can review summary information about the progress of your engagements on Cloud. You can use these high-level views to monitor your schedule.

Save all your CaseWare Working Papers on CaseWare Cloud. Now you can Sync, Upload and Download CaseWare files to and from CaseWare Cloud.

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If your firm uses the Time app to track time and expense entries, you review your firm’s costs and billing in Cloud. Using the Time and Billing apps, you can view summary information about your firm’s overall costs and invoices on Cloud. If you need more detailed information about the costs incurred by the firm, you can also run reports on the Analysis app.

The Expense app creates entries for billable and non-billable expenses, and allows you to add receipts associated with those expenses. Mobile support means you can enter expenses sooner and keep more accurate records.

The Billing app prepares both WIP and final invoices based on entries created the Time and Expense apps. Once prepared, invoices can be sent to clients directly from the app, or printed and sent by mail.

The Analysis app generates both detailed and summary reports based on data collected through Cloud. These reports can be based on time entries, expenses, invoices, or WIP, and provide the information required to track your work on a given engagement and best decide how to allocate resources.

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Tool What is it?

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This is a useful tool to get quick access to things like your Firm Dashboard.

This option deals with all the back-end settings your Firm Champion will be dealing with. Here all the settings for your Firm’s instance of CaseWare Cloud is set. Examples will include permission settings for certain people, uploading your Firm’s logo and even the standard way messages are sent via CaseWare Cloud in instances where discussions, requests or instructions are given from a CaseWare Cloud Audit Engagement (Example file requests are given and an email is triggered from CaseWare Cloud to the individual with a short message and a link to access this Audit Engagement on CaseWare Cloud where the request can be actioned). This is why it is important to watch the video entitled Getting the most out of CaseWare Cloud | Setting up your instance.

This is your instruction button. Here you can click on it to initiate a new Discussion, Task, File Request, perform a File Procedure, Access CaseWare Time and your Expenses.

This is your search function. Here you can type in any search query and the predictive search function will sort a list of results per Entity, People, Files etc.

This is your discussion board. Here you can click to send messages to specific people.

Need help? Just click on the help option to access a wide variety of self-help tools to guide you on how to use CaseWare Cloud.

Top right, you will see your Profile. Click on the icon to edit your profile and view your permissions, restrictions and settings

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No need to send emails - Communicate with the chatter function

The great thing about CaseWare Cloud, is the ability to keep all correspondence about an engagement in one central place. Gone are the days where you needed to send emails to track progress. Staff come and go, and contacts also change. By using the chatter function, you can go back and see who said what when, even if those parties are no longer with the firm or that client’s organisation. For Engagement specific communications however, use tasks.

• See who is logged in and search for a contact and start chatting

• Even change your status if you need to avoid interruptions