How a top-tier professional services firm cut work paper preparation time by 70%

For every reconciliation, someone writes the narrative: what was reconciled, variances found, actions taken, risk factors. Forty preparers, 50 accounts each, three pages per account. 6,000 pages of work papers every month. Most of it formulaic, but every preparer wrote every narrative from scratch.

Cortex-generated work papers

Cortex generates draft work papers for each completed reconciliation: account summary, variance analysis with root cause classification, risk factor assessment, recommended actions, and supporting observations from the underlying data.

"The first time I saw a Cortex work paper, I thought someone on the team had written it," the operations manager says. "Right structure, right detail, specific observations referencing actual data. The preparer had not touched it yet."

Preparers now review and approve instead of create. What took 45 minutes per account takes 10 to 15 minutes. The account reconciliation module provides the underlying evidence: matched transactions, variance details, historical patterns. Work papers are generated from actual reconciliation data, not template placeholders.

Results

70 percent faster. Four times the capacity per preparer (50 to 200 accounts). Review cycle from 3 days to same day. Quality floor went up: consistent structure, consistent detail. Junior preparers learn accounting judgment faster because they evaluate AI-generated analysis instead of doing data entry.

Explore how Arvexi's Cortex AI generates audit-quality work papers as part of the account reconciliation workflow.