Beyond the Spreadsheet: How FGMK Uses Alwin for Larger, Longer-Running Audit Work

Taking audit automation further

FGMK had already built a strong base of agents in Excel Agents, including cash testing, journal entry testing, and financial statement testing. More recently, they began using Alwin, DataSnipper's web-based agentic audit automation platform, through the design partner program.

As part of this partnership, they worked closely with the product team, testing Alwin on audit materials for busy-season and year-end work, and providing valuable feedback as the platform was being developed.

The shift built on what FGMK already had, while giving them more room for the parts of the job that extend beyond a single spreadsheet, work spanning more documents, more formats, and more time than a typical Excel session allows for.

Nicholas Robbins, Director, Audit and Accounting at FGMK, walks through what using Alwin looks like in practice below.

"I immediately tried Alwin on some of our more difficult tasks, like hundreds of pages of GL extraction, and it worked really well. It can also keep tasks running in the background and pick up right where you left off. What was genuinely impressive is that DataSnipper found a way to let us work outside of Excel while still keeping it in a secure, contained environment. The alternative is giving an AI model open access to your systems in the background, which just isn't as secure."

Nicholas T. Robbins

Director, Audit and Accounting

Alwin in practice

Q: What can Alwin add to the work you're already doing in Excel Agents?

A: A lot of it comes down to format and scale. Alwin can work across PDF, Word, and Excel, and reason across those formats together, not just stay inside Excel. Extractions of hundreds of pages of general ledger detail, for example, are something it handles really well. And because it's web-based rather than tied to an open Excel session, it can also just keep running in the background. Rather than a task ending when the workday did, Alwin lets the team kick off a job in the evening and come back to it ready for review in the morning, a natural fit for larger, more complex testing that takes longer to run.

Q: How do Excel Agents and Alwin fit together day to day?

A: It's not really either-or, they connect pretty seamlessly. A lot of our agents get built in Excel Agents first, working through a task step by step, prompt by prompt, and one of the new features we really like is Chat into Agent, which lets us take that whole conversation with Excel Agents and turn it into a reusable agent we can move over to Alwin. So we might start in Excel Agents building something out, then shift to Alwin for tasks that involve a larger volume of documents or more complex, cross-format work.

Q: What are the benefits of Alwin?

A: Being able to have tasks keep running in the background and pick up where you left off. Handling larger files. The review experience is really nice too, since you can see everything side by side, the steps the agent took alongside the Excel workbook where the work has been snipped, so you can give notes and see exactly where things are. And one of my favorite features is being able to leave review notes on specific cells, where you can leave ten different comments and send them all at once.

Q: How does using agents differ across roles on your team?

A: We have agents built for different groups. On the preparer side, there are agents for building out work papers and snipping information. On the review side, we have agents that check for consistency across a workbook, or review financial statements to make sure things roll up properly and flag anything that looks off. It works as a helpful second pass, since we're still reviewing everything ourselves, but it adds another layer of confidence. Our QC department runs financial statements through an agent alongside their own independent review. And we appreciate being able to manage access to agents, controlling who can create them and who can use them.

Q: What gives you confidence when using these agents?

A: Governance and security are definitely top of mind for everyone right now. DataSnipper is SOC 2 certified, so it's all very secure. It's very important to us that our information doesn't feed into or train the models, and DataSnipper allows this. That protects client confidentiality and keeps us from having to worry about data ending up somewhere it shouldn't.

Q: Why DataSnipper over other AI tools?

A: With most other tools, you can feed in a document and it'll spit out an Excel version, but you can't verify it. It's just output. With DataSnipper, it's verifiable, since you can trace exactly where every number came from. Having DataSnipper overall makes our audits more defensible, because you have the snips right there and can view them in real time.

Looking ahead: Expanding how the team works in Alwin

With engagements, agents, and team members organized in one place, the team can move between preparation and review without losing track of where things stand.

As FGMK's work keeps growing in scale and complexity, Alwin is growing right alongside it, giving the team room to take on more without losing the traceability and control their audits depend on.