Wiredelta® and auditing supergroup LetRegnskab are teaming up to make auditing less like a chore and more like a party! With over 100 years of collective experience, LetRegnskab caters to auditors and accountants who prepare financial reports for their companies and clients. Their mission is to create an app that entitles everyone to easily prepare annual financial statements. With Wiredelta’s forward-thinking attitude on their side, LetRegnskab set out to save the auditing day!
Disclaimer: The information and screenshots presented below reflect the website and/or application at the moment of its publication. Wiredelta does not have a maintenance agreement in place with this client, therefore all changes and updates that occurred after this date have been made by the client.
The Problem
Unfortunately, preparing annual financial statements requires a lot of extra steps that didn’t use to be so simple…
1) Access accounts
This is usually the most difficult part. Since there’s no standardized method for formatting business accounts, everyone does it differently, meaning auditors have trouble knowing which way is up and down. Thankfully, Wiredelta and LetRegnskab were determined to fix this complex issue!
2) Check accounts
Huzzah! Now, you can start doing the actual statement prep. However, one must go through the endless pile of receipts and bank statements to verify the numbers. The ride’s not over yet!
3) Map accounts
Even though you now have an account list, most of these account names are still company-specific. So, the auditor is forced to manually map each account, linking all accounts to a government-approved account name. Goodness gracious…
4) Crunch accounts
With Steps 2 and 3 done, one can crunch the accounts for tax exemptions, VAT, P&L statements, etc. Before LetRegnskab existed, most auditors developed their own Excel model to crunch accounts. That is fine, but updating the model to meet the government’s expectations is economically and practically demanding, and highly inefficient if everyone has to do it for their own models. In the software industry, it would be equivalent to everyone building their own frameworks for web and mobile development rather than relying on the awesome open source community. Yikes!
5) Submit audit
Upon completion of an audit, the Danish government requires the financial statement to be sent in an XBRL file format. If you managed to survive this far, then you are a true hero.
We totally understand if you felt shaken up after reading these steps. Though these steps seem daunting, we worked tirelessly to prevent people from feeling like banging their head against the keyboard…
Needless to say, we have quite the surprise for all of you…
The Solution
This is where the fun really begins! To solve the automation problem in steps (2)-(5), we needed to pull information from various sources to crunch the mapped accounts through LetRegnskab’s 2000 controllers. Thus, LetRegnskab and Wiredelta partnered up with e-conomic, a free app service that is well-integrated with our own web app and the auditors’ accounting software:
A) Integration with LetRegnskab:
Once auditors register themselves on the platform, they begin preparing the financial statements (FINALLY!). An easy-to-use identifier feature lets auditors uniquely and securely identify the client’s ID in their software accounting system and company registration number. Below shows the auditor Woiremose & Partner with the first 6 clients using e-conomic:
B) Integration with e-conomic
When clicking the green e-conomic button for the first time, the auditor will either input the access ID to the client’s e-conomic account or request access from the client:
Upon obtaining access, the accounts from e-conomic will transfer to LetRegnskab. There, the auditor will first group the accounts in Income Statement, Balance Sheet or Tax Statements:
LetRegnskab is like a phonebook for auditors. Auditors can always work with previous clients and save their accounts forever. Those who audit together, stay together!
C) Mapping and export
Once accounts are grouped, it’s time for the auditor to match the company’s accounts with the government standard accounts. This is tricky because there are (1) a lot of standard accounts to choose from, (2) the auditor has to do this for each account without choosing the same standard account, and finally (3) there is nowhere to place government standard accounts.
However, there’s no need to fear! We created a user-friendly searchable dropdown menu to resolve these problems. At this point, we settled on AngularJS as the frontend framework and NodeJS as an underlying technology to meet performance requirements. The end result includes the imported account number, account name, and amount from e-conomic, and then the searchable dropdown on the right. In the screenshot below the auditor started searching on “tilgode”:
However, the mapping challenge didn’t stop at the searchable dropdown. The mapped accounts needed to be exported back into LetRegnskab in order to crunch the numbers in LetRegnskab’s many controllers. We even managed to satisfy both the government and LetRegnskab by following their standard .csv file format. No extra headaches or aspirin needed!
Finally, because auditors legally have to keep a copy of the mappings, we needed to allow for exports to the local machine. The Wiredelta dev team brainstormed heavily with LetRegnskab to create a slick FTP dump that the LetRegnskab model could read and crunch easily. It stores the exports on both the auditor’s local machine and on LetRegnskab’s servers when hitting “Eksport”. What was once a pain is now a trip to paradise. Bring out the champagne and celebrate!
LetRegnskab is an auditing tool built in NodeJS using AngularJS that allows to pull accounting data via APIs from e-conomic to map accounts within the income statement, balance sheet and tax statements. The database technology is PostgreSQL to allow for flexibility yet keeping the database relational, which is required for the exports to work.
Next Step for LetRegnskab
As of now, LetRegnskab is touring Denmark and partnering up with e-conomic, the largest accounting software platform in Denmark, to onboard more than 100,000 users and 5,000 auditors on the platform. In the picture below, LetRegnskab CEO Morten Boysen is having an exciting get-together with fellow auditors to help them use the new tool for auditing financial accounts.
Once Danish auditors onboard with LetRegnskab, the partnership with e-conomic allows LetRegnskab to expand to the rest of Scandinavia and beyond. In each new available country, LetRegnskab’s auditors help to prepare the groundwork for easier auditing for other auditors, governments, and clients alike. First stop: Scandinavia; next stop: the world!
Conclusion
The Wiredelta Clan is delighted to work with LetRegnskab and join their enterprising project of improving business’s financial lives. We make it our top priority to simplify even the most complex of procedures and make auditing a piece of cake. Like LetRegnskab, we are always hungry for similar projects that set ambitious and purposeful goals. The startup company gods gave Wiredelta the gift of life for the singular purpose of transforming those goals into everyday realities.
