Review the prior year's engagement

You are preparing to work on an engagement for a client who you've done work for in past years. During the planning stage, you will likely want to review this client's old files.

Locating the prior year's file

To begin, you can find the engagement file from the prior year by searching the Files page.

To locate the prior year's file:

  1. Ensure that you have the Viewer role or equivalent rights for the client entity.

  2. From the Cloud menu, select the appropriate Cloud page (such as Working Papers or Other Engagements).

  3. From the entity selector, select the entity for your client.

    Choose a client entity from the entity selector to filter your view in Cloud.

Reviewing a Working Papers file

This section describes functionality only available with Caseware Working Papers.

Learn more about Working Papers.

If your organization did publish the Working Papers file for the prior year, you should be able to find it here. You can open the file to review client documents from the last engagement.

Open a sync copy of the client file for last year's engagement.

Sharing a file with the engagement team

Once you have found the engagement file from the prior year, you may want to share it with the engagement team for this year.

To grant access to specific files or activities in an entity:

  1. Ensure that you have the Owner role or equivalent rights to the files.

  2. Ensure that the users or groups have been granted the following roles only on the entity where the files belong:

    • Contact - Entity Access role for contacts or contact groups.

    • Entity Access role for staff or staff groups.

    For example, if you want to grant staff member John Smith access to specific files in entity A, make sure that you select the Entity Access role for John Smith in the sharing properties of entity A.

    The following figure shows the sharing properties icon.

    Share icon in the entity properties.

  3. From the Cloud menu (), select Files.

    If you want to grant access to an activity, select Activities.

  4. Select the files or activities that you want to assign roles for, then select Share ().

  5. Select the users or groups you want to have access to the file or activity, then select Assign Roles to (#).

    The list of roles that displays is different based on whether the selected users or groups are Staff or Contacts.

    Sharing specific files with a contact.

  6. Select the check box next to the roles that you want to grant the users or groups.

  7. Select Share.

You have shared the prior year's file with your engagement team. They will be able to access the file for reference while they are working on the current year's engagement.

Reviewing materiality

In order to determine materiality for this year's engagement, you can review the materiality from last year.

To review materiality:

  1. Ensure that you have the Viewer role or equivalent rights for the Working Papers file.

  2. From the Cloud menu, select Working Papers.

  3. Select the Working Papers file for last year's engagement. In the details pane on the right, select More Actions () | Open Sync Copy.

    Select this command to open a sync copy of last year's engagement file.

  4. In the Working Papers file, look in the Document Manager for the materiality guidelines. Open these documents.

    Open the documents to review the materiality data.

You can review the contents of the materiality documents to help you determine materiality for this year.

Reviewing last year's time and expenses

This section describes functionality only available with CasewareCloud Time, part of the Caseware Cloud suite.

Learn more about Time.

When you are getting ready to set a budget, you may find it helpful to review the costs associated with the engagement from the prior year. If your organization uses the Time app to track time and expense entries, you can run a summary report that displays these costs. The report parameters should be as follows:

  • Type: Time
  • Format: Summary
  • Group by: Work Code
  • Staff: All
  • Entity: (entity name for your engagement)
  • Engagement: (last year's engagement)
  • From date: First day of the last year
  • To date: Last day of the last year

To generate a summary Time report:

  1. Ensure that you have the View all staff entries permission.

  2. From the Cloud menu, select Analysis.

  3. From the Type drop-down menu, choose Time.

  4. From the Format drop-down menu, choose Summary.

  5. Set the other parameters for your report.

  6. Select Generate.

    Select the Generate button to run your report.

You have successfully generated a report of Time entries for last year's engagement, grouped by work codes and subtotaled.

The total time and costs for all time entries on last year's engagement.

You can export the results of this report by selecting the Export button at the bottom of the left-hand pane. You can then run a report for expenses and another report for invoices, to compare your costs with the amounts billed to your client.