Capital Confirmation, Inc.

From the August 2009 article on Audit/Engagement Tools, part of the 2009
Review of Engagement
& Trial Balance Systems.

Capital Confirmation allows firms to save time and increase audit quality
in the bank confirmation process. Capital Confirmation’s web-based electronic
confirmation process allows confirmations to be answered by banks in hours,
not days and weeks, like the traditional paper/mail method. The company’s
research states that 87 percent of the confirmations are returned and completed
within 48 hours. In addition to time efficiencies, the risk of fraud is dramatically
reduced using this product. The product electronically transmits data between
Capital Confirmation and the bank. The combination of the secure transmission
of data and the authentication of the responding bank de-creases the risk of
fraud.

The product offers an easy-to-use interface and provides a brief introductory
tutorial video (less than 10 minutes) that teaches you everything you need to
know to efficiently operate the product.

Capital Confirmation has agreements with nine of the top 10 banks in the United
States and agreements with over half of the top 50. These agreements allow the
banks to complete the confirmation requests in a more timely, accurate and efficient
manner. Bank of America, Citizen’s Bank, Charter One and SunTrust now
require all confirmations to be sent using the Capital Confirmation process.

Another nice feature of this pro-duct is that it integrates with Thomson Reuters
Engagement CS, CaseWare Working Papers and CCH’s ProSystem fx Engagement.
Each of these engagement products has direct links to the web-based platform,
and the information collected is automatically included in the engagement file.

This product can help your firm reduce the “unproductive” hours
spent in the paper confirmation process of audit engagements. More than 6,300
firms have used this product, but my research shows that the upper-level managers
and partners don’t even realize it. Lower-level staff are learning about
this product and making the decision to use the product during the audit process.
In my opinion, that’s all a firm really needs to know. If the lower-level
staff see the value in the product, then it must be good.