Welcome to the Fieldguide Product Release for Q3 2021! Every quarter, we round up our latest innovations to help you meet the needs of your firm and clients.
Included in the Q3 2021 Product Release are the following features and updates:
- New testing workspace - Test and review more efficiently with a “single pane of glass” view for all data associated with a control.
- Task improvements - Review with confidence utilizing comments on tasks and automated review task creation.
- Redesigned engagement export - Get a more holistic view of engagements with sign-off and document data included in exports.
- More granular permissions - Improve access control with the ability to grant firm members specific permissions to create clients, engagements, users, and more.
- Faster engagement and report creation - Templatize entire engagements and reports for maximum time savings.
- Activity tracking - Track template changes, view sheet activity, and require clients to track changes when updating forms.
Streamline your workflow with a more efficient review experience
New testing workspace
When testing controls or reviewing control testing, it’s important to see the full view of that control. Our updated testing workspace provides a “single pane of glass” view into a control. For each control, view all rows and columns from the sheet, documents, sampling sheets, requests, and tasks related to the selected control.
Task improvements
Review comments are a crucial part of the audit and have their own workflow. Reviewers want to easily know if their notes and comments have been addressed. Preparers need to know when they are assigned comments. With Fieldguide Tasks, you can assign review notes and comments as you review. With the addition of task comments, any conversation between the note author and assigned staff can be managed right within the task itself, until the task is ultimately marked complete.
Additionally, tasks will now be automatically created to notify reviewers when changes are made after sign off. When a previously approved sheet row or document is modified, reviewers will be automatically assigned a task. This task will explain the change, so the reviewer can re-review if needed, then clear the task. Reviewers will see these tasks on the dashboard in Fieldguide, and in any email summaries they receive.
Fulfill your firm’s EQCR requirements with detailed engagement and account management capabilities
Redesigned engagement export
While Fieldguide has its own archiving capabilities, firms may still need external archives of their engagements. Firms can now export a zipped archive of the entire engagement to email. The export now includes every sheet within the engagement, all columns on the sheet, document sign-off history, request listing, and documents and folder trees from each engagement.
More granular permissioning
Every firm has unique permissioning needs. Whether you want very open access or highly specific permission groups, Fieldguide has options for you. Additional permissioning is now available for your firm members. Unique permissions to add companies, add engagements, add users, and archive engagements can now be granted or removed from users.
Faster engagement and report creation
Fieldguide is committed to increasing efficiency for firms. With Engagement Templates, an entire engagement can be templatized, including Sheets, Tasks, Requests, Folders, Documents, and Sheet Viewse. Creating a new engagement is as simple as cloning this all inclusive template. Save valuable time on each new engagement and ensure each new engagement is created to your firm’s standards.
Fieldguide's report templates currently allow for the inclusion of standard verbiage and dynamic form fields. Control tables can now be added to report templates. Entire reports can now be templated out, so that per engagement modifications can be completely eliminated. This reduces user error in creating reports, decreases review time looking for those user errors, and allows you to deliver your final reports more quickly to your clients.
Activity tracking
Fieldguide has always allowed you to clone documents and sheets from existing templates. Now you can also track if a template has changed after you’ve cloned it.
Sheet activity is another area where our firms wanted additional insights into user behavior. Using the Sheets menu (ellipses in the upper right) you can now View Activity to see actions taken on a Sheet. For individual field information, click the expand icon inside of any cell.
Fieldguide forms provide variable fields that can be completed by staff or clients. These form fields then flow into reports for easy templating and report generation. With Track Changes, you can now force the changes customers make to the formatted text form fields to be tracked for your review. This is especially useful for System Description fields.
If you'd like to learn more about these features and updates, reach out to your account team or request a demo.
Alex Liu
Software Engineer @ Fieldguide
