Why Beever & Struthers Made Circit Central to Audit Delivery
Beever & Struthers (now Menzies) is a UK audit firm with teams working across multiple offices. As part of its wider digital transformation programme, the firm implemented Circit to modernise how it requests, tracks and manages all confirmation types, bringing greater consistency, control and visibility to the process.Zaaid Ahmed, Digital Transformation Lead, joined Beever and Struthers in August 2023 as part of a KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) project from the University of Manchester, working on an external audit digital transformation programme. Since then, he has seen Circit evolve into a key platform underpinning a more standardised and measurable approach to confirmations, helping teams improve operational consistency, strengthen compliance confidence, and significantly increase success rates against internal benchmarks.
THE RESULTS
· Stronger audit trail and compliance confidence
· Faster roll-forward and reduced client effort with no authorisation requirements
· A consistent approach across offices and teams
· Substantial improvement to response times
Bringing consistency across teams and offices
For Zaaid, one of the most immediate impacts of implementing Circit was the ability to standardise how confirmation requests were approached across the business.
“In terms of day-to-day delivery, what Circit has really helped with is a consistent way of approaching the bank confirmations.”
This consistency became the foundation for everything that followed. With a single platform supporting delivery across offices, teams were able to align on one process, gain clearer oversight of requests, and reduce variability in how confirmations were managed.
Circit provides audited entities with a single interaction point during the engagement, improving their experience and reducing involvement required.
Meaningful gains through adoption and process maturity
When Zaaid joined, Circit was already in use, but still early in team adoption. What changed over time was not just usage of the platform, but the firm’s ability to embed the workflow around it, unlocking strong results. “What I have seen over the last two and a half years is that the timeframe in which we are getting the bank information back has remarkably improved, and Circit is obviously that key platform in achieving that.” That improvement came as teams moved from simply using the tool, to operation alising it as part of a broader delivery process, supported by training, internal communications and consistent workflows.
“Implementing technology takes adoption of the workflows across the team. Key users need to be trained and to adopt the new ways of working.”As those workflows matured, the firm also saw value in features that reduced repeated effort year-on-year, suchas roll-forwarding confirmation requests.“We appreciate that we don’t have to get the authority from the clients again and that we can just simply rollforward the requests. That's a big efficiency gain and time saver.”
Measurable ROI: improving benchmark success rates
For the firm, one of the clearest indicators of ROI has been improvements against an internal benchmark: confirmation responses received within three months of the year-end.
“When I started working with Circit, I was looking at the success rates of our confirmation requests within a three-month period of year-end. At that stage, our success rate of getting the responses back on time was a lot lower. However, after collaboratively working with the Circit team over the last two years, we have been able to remarkably improve the success rate and the speed of getting confirmation responses back. In my opinion, that is a huge return on investment and efficiency gain of using Circit.”
A product that evolves with audit technology needs
From Zaaid’s perspective, Circit stands out in audit technology not just for performance, but for product maturity and continued improvement. “I’ve been quite vocal about it internally within our office and the teams I work with. In my experience, Circit is one of the strongest technology players I have come across in the audit technology ecosystem.” In terms of overall confidence in the platform’s performance and differentiation in the market, Zaaid is clear:
“Circit has been the platform I've primarily used. Right now, I don’t think there is another confirmations platform I have used that can provide the level of service and the range of features that Circit offers.”
A collaborative and responsive partnership
Zaaid describes Circit’s approach as supportive and hands-on, particularly during earlier stages of adoption when the team was still becoming familiar with the platform. “We have had our monthly check-ins where we could discuss issues, challenges or the performance of the platform and the team was always helpful in understanding our perspective and offering support. If we had to give it a mark, it would be a strong 9 or 10 out of 10.”
Designed for the realities of audit practice
Zaaid believes Circit demonstrates a clear understanding of how auditors work in practice, both through its core features and its technology vision.
“The platform is designed with the users in mind. The key things which make Circit stand out are the visibility of the requests, the data it provides, and the audit trail and the roll-forward functionality.”
So, what is next in this ongoing partnership? For Zaaid, the next phase is innovation: building on the progress already made in improving success rates and embedding the process. He sees the combination of data, APIs and AI enabling entirely new workflows: Zaaid believes it offers a clear opportunity to improve the confirmations that fall outside the firm’s benchmark windows. “I have explored Circit APIs and developed some initial process maps and designs of how we can use the APIs to automate the workflows.”
A critical platform for audit delivery
Today, the majority of firm’s confirmation work is delivered through Circit, and Zaaid sees it as a core dependency of the current process. “Almost 80 to 90% of our confirmation requests are done through Circit. I cannot imagine going back to using manual requests or doing it any other way, the platform is key for those requests. If we didn’t have it, it would be like switching back to landline phones from smartphones.”
What’s next in the partnership
Looking forward, Zaaid sees innovation as the natural next step after operational success. “I imagine that the next thing will be how the team can innovate more, because the first phase is getting the process right, getting the success rate right and then doing more innovative things with the technology. For example, what can be done with the APIs and the data that is available through Circit?”
"I also see Open Banking as quite impactful, and as a natural next step following the work we did on bank confirmations during our project. It can not only help advance the confirmations process, but also support a more data-driven audit, which was the core theme of our KTP project. Used selectively, it can fit smoothly into the confirmations workflow where account-level transaction data is sufficient, helping deal with some of those few requests that might otherwise not come back.
At the same time, having access to the bank’s transaction records allows auditors to do things like check the receipt of debtor payments in the post-balance sheet period, meaning queries that would normally go back to clients can be resolved much more efficiently. That would be a logical next step for me."
reliable in delivery and backed by a genuinely responsive team”