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Always know where your engagements stand
For 30 years, engagement work has run on two surfaces: the binder and the sheet. Both are precise, both are auditable, and neither was built to answer the question a manager asks more than any other, which is where the engagement stands right now. Answering that from a binder or a sheet means filtering, sorting, and reconciling against memory or a side tracker. So teams built the side tracker. An Asana board, a Trello card wall, an Excel status tab, a whiteboard photographed after the Monday meeting.
Every one of those is another surface to maintain, another place the truth might live, and another chance for the tracker to drift from what is actually happening on the engagement. The gap widens the moment agents enter the picture. Fieldguide's Field Agents carry out real engagement work, and Field Auditor is the one that handles testing. When the testing agents within Field Auditor are working through an audit program or running across dozens of controls in parallel with your team, a static list doesn’t show you what is in flight, what is waiting on a person, and what is ready for review.
That is the gap Field Board closes. Field Board is now live in Fieldguide's Financial Audit and Advisory products, and it changes what managing an engagement looks like.
No second system to keep in sync
Field Board organizes the work into lifecycle columns, with each piece of the engagement shown as a card that carries its own state. What sets it apart from any board your team has used before is that it is not a copy of the engagement kept in sync by hand. It is the engagement. Drag a card and you trigger the real underlying action: move it into testing and the agent run starts; move it forward after review and the sign-off follows; move it back and it returns for rework with the assignees already in place. Because the board and the work are the same thing, there is nothing to reconcile.
A board that matches how your team works
Field Board works differently on each side, because the work does.
On the Advisory side, each card is a single control. The board runs six columns: Testing Not Started, Testing, Pending, Preparer Review, Manager Review, and Review Complete. The card shows the control name and framework, who is assigned (agent and human), how long it has been in its current state, and status badges.
On the Audit side, each card is an audit program, a full sheet of procedures rather than a single control. The board runs four columns: Not Started, In Progress, In Review, and Complete, grouped by phase so Planning and Field Work live on one surface. Inside In Progress, sub-indicators tell you whether a program has an agent working, needs input, or is waiting on the client. Each card shows its sign-offs, task count, document count, and days in its current state.
The two column sets are built for their own workflows and are not meant to map one to one. Advisory controls are granular, so the flow carries finer review stages. Audit programs are larger and multi-step, so the board keeps them readable at the program level.
See exactly what Testing Agents have done
On both boards, the testing agents within Field Auditor execute the work, and the board is where you watch them do it. The rhythm differs by side. An advisory control is granular enough that Testing Agent often finishes it in close to a single run, so cards move from testing to review quickly. An audit program is a larger effort, so Field Auditor completes part of it, pauses for input, then continues, which fits a kick-off-and-come-back rhythm. In both cases the card holds the current state, so no one has to ask what Testing Agent has and has not done. For now, the testing agents within Field Auditor are the ones the board triggers. As more Field Agents become available, you will be able to trigger them from Field Board as well.
Review and judgment stay with your team
Field Board never moves work on its own without a reason. Cards advance because something happened: an agent run completed, a document request came in, a reviewer signed off, or a team member moved a card deliberately. On the Advisory side, when Testing Agent finishes a control, the card moves into Preparer Review and opens the Agent Review Experience, a single screen that brings the agent's output, the supporting evidence, and the review actions together (see below).
The preparer reviews there and either advances the control to Manager Review or sends it back. The manager reviews from the Manager Review column and moves it to Review Complete. On the Audit side, preparer and manager sign-offs move an audit program from In Review to Complete, with the same dedicated review surface coming soon.
It’s important to note that Field Board does not require agents. Every board runs in manual mode, with an agent-and-human toggle on the work, so firms that are not using Field Agents yet, or that prefer to handle certain work by hand, get the same visibility through the same columns.
Keep the views your team already trusts
Field Board supplements the surfaces your team already knows. On the Audit side, the classic binder stays available as a toggle and reflects the same data. On the Advisory side, the sheet view stays right where it is, with a list view of the same board alongside it. A senior documenting a sample of controls can stay in the sheet all day. The manager checking the engagement opens the board to read the queue. They are looking at the same work, and neither is reconciling against the other.
What your team gets back
If you manage engagements, this is the surface that gives you the status back. Instead of reconstructing where things stand from a binder, a sheet, and a side tracker, you open one board and read it in seconds: what is in flight, what is blocked, what is waiting on you. Preparers stop asking what to work on next, because the next card is in front of them. Partners walk into a status meeting already knowing where the engagement stands, so the meeting is about decisions rather than status reporting. And firms running Asana, Trello, Monday, or an Excel tracker beside their engagement platform can retire those tools, because the board's state is the engagement's state, not a hand-kept copy that drifts by Friday.
The hour a manager once spent assembling status goes to the work that actually needs a manager: the harder review questions, the judgment calls on tricky controls, and the conversations with the client. Preparers spend less of the week looking for what is next and more of it on substantive testing and on the professional development that moves a career forward, including the study hours a certification takes. Partners get shorter status meetings and more room for the decisions that set the direction of an engagement and the firm. For a practice taking on more work with the same headcount, that recovered capacity is what lets them say yes to the next engagement instead of turning it away.
Whether your team is running agents across every program or none of them yet, Field Board adds a new way to see and move the work, alongside the sheet and the binder you already trust.
See it on your own engagement
Book a demo to see what your next advisory or financial audit engagement looks like on Field Board.
