You can read the article here.

Anyway, we hope you like the new look and feel as well as the new website’s tighter integration with the AuditConfirmations software itself. As always, please let us know if you have any feedback to share.

Remember, in any case where an alternative procedure request does not fit the needs of your audit procedures or those of your audit client, you can always use our standard confirmation service for accounts at any bank and still get the benefits of increased convenience, higher response rates, faster completion, and increased security over the traditional paper-based confirmation process.

If you have additional questions about how this service works, what to expect, or what information you will need to provide your clients, check the previous posts or get in touch and let us know how we can help!

Otherwise we hope the new service is helpful and we certainly appreciate those audit teams which helped us by doing alternative procedure requests during our short Beta period.

The goal of this service is to directly integrate with bank systems to provide auditors a completely secure way to do an alternative procedure to confirmations, start to finish, in just a couple of minutes.

As far as we know, this is the first service anywhere that can do this.

Here are the quick answers to questions we anticipate about this service:

How does it work?

We have built a layer into the auditconfirmations.com system that integrates with the online banking systems of various financial institutions. So, what happens is the auditor creates the request in the auditconfirmations.com system and specifies the client contact that will login with the bank. The client specified will get an email with a secure, one-time use link into the auditconfirmations.com system where they will be able to review your request and then launch a login box to their bank’s online banking system. They simply login with their regular online banking username and password for that bank and our system takes care of the rest. The bank’s systems are searched for deposit accounts and loans… any accounts found are added to the confirmation and the client is asked to sign-off on the confirmation. Once completed by the client, the auditor approves the request. The auditor’s credit card on file is then charged and the system pulls the balances of the accounts on the response. That’s it… a completed form is then available to download/print for the audit file.

Which banks can I use it with?

Contact us to get a list of banks we are immediately supporting. We will do our best to add additional banks as quickly as we can. If there is a particular bank that is especially important for your audits, let us know.

How much does it cost?

$9 per account… so for example, a confirm where two deposit accounts and a loan are found, the auditors card will be charged $27. Since we have to pay a small fee for each account accessed, we have to charge per account included on each confirm (rather than per confirm, like our standard confirmation service). We are doing the best we can to keep the fees as reasonable as possible.

How do we (and our clients) know it is secure?

We certainly recognize using the client’s online banking login information is very sensitive. However, the technology platform we use to make the integration between auditconfirmations.com and online banking systems possible is the same technology platform used by many of the largest banking institutions themselves to build their own online banking services.

Auditconfirmations.com systems DO NOT, at any point, see or store your client’s bank login information. Despite never seeing or storing the bank login information, the technology between our servers and the bank’s systems explicitly PREVENTS any access to customer information beyond read-only access to account information such as the account balance.

Additionally, the auditconfirmations.com application itself encrypts all data transmissions of any kind with minimum 128 bit encryption. We also have daily security scans done by an independent third party (McAfee) to identify any potential vulnerabilities and ensure ongoing security. AuditConfirmations has implemented security controls for both its technology stack and its confirmation process.

Why is it only available to people who join the “Beta Program”?

Doing alternative procedures to bank confirmations, particularly across multiple banks whose systems make available very different data in very different formats from each other, is an extraordinarily complex and testing-intensive process to accomplish. We think that, at least for the near-future, it will be best if we approve each auditor or firm that would like to do alternative procedures to bank confirmations so we can provide them concise but complete information on what to expect.

Other questions?

Get in touch and let us know.

Hopefully this is another big step forward in making confirmations happier and more productive. Thanks to everyone who has made this possible!

If you would like to join the “Beta” program, just send us an email to inquiries@auditconfirmations.com with the email address you use to access AuditConfirmations and we will sign up you up as well as send you information on the newest services we are offering. We have several features coming to the “Beta” program very soon so get signed up today.

“Beta” services are subject to the same terms of services as our standard confirmation services. Review the terms of service anytime at http://auditconfirmations.com/terms

As you may have noticed, we have introduced some promotional pricing to kick off busy season. All confirmations, bank or receivable, will be $6/confirm for at least January and February. This is obviously less expensive than our prior pricing at $4.95/account confirmed. Hopefully this change makes giving electronic confirmations a try during the 2010 audit busy season a bit more attractive.

We are especially eager to see heavier use of A/R confirmations as we think electronic A/R confirms are dramatically more efficient, perhaps even more so than electronic bank confirmations. That means happier, more productive auditors which is always the goal.

As always, if you have questions on pricing, billing, or anything else contact us at inquiries@auditconfirmations.com.

To spare you the technical details, we increased the power of the hardware by about double. More importantly, we completely rebuilt the technology stack from the operating system up to a much more efficient and fast stack. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we heavily compressed the amount of data that comes down to the client (your computer) on every request.

The short version of all of this is you should immediately see an approximately 10X (yes, 10X) improvement in performance. Basically, AuditConfirmations just got a whole lot snappier. As with everything we do, we hope it makes doing your confirmations happier and more productive!

Also, congratulations to Capital Confirmation and their Confirmation.com service which came in first place in the category. We certainly hope to catch up with Confirmation.com in the future but for now we are simply thrilled that electronic confirmation services are clearly becoming a standard practice within the profession. We look forward to seeing the results again next year!