Field Financials: Rolled Forward & Data Linked, Ready for Review

Every financial statement engagement starts the same way. A preparer opens last year's issued PDF report, or the Word document behind it, and rebuilds it by hand: updating dates, retyping headers, reformatting tables that shifted when a note was added or removed. Once the foundation is in place, the real work starts. Current-year values are rekeyed or recoded from the trial balance into the statement, line by line. If the trial balance changes after that, someone has to remember to go back and review every dependent cell by hand.

This isn't a training gap. It's the structure of the tools. Word and Excel were never built to share a data layer, so every engagement has the same problem: how do you get from a prior-period report to a linked draft without rebuilding the whole thing for your current engagement?

Drafting Agent is now live in Field Financials, eliminating both halves of that problem: the roll-forward and the manual re-keying that follows it.

From Prior-Year Report to Rolled Forward Draft

Drafting Agent reads the prior-year issued PDF as a structural anchor, rolls forward the dates, and preserves the report's structure and firm-specific formatting into a native, cloud-based first draft inside Field Financials' live editor, not a forced connection between an Excel workbook and a Word file, but the actual document the team will review and issue. From there, it populates current-year values directly from Fieldguide's engagement data layer, the single source of truth for every line item and value in the statement, so the draft doesn't sit still as a rolled-forward shell waiting to be linked later. There's no export, no mail merge, and no separate generation step to rerun whenever a balance gets updated.

Every cell in that draft carries unique metadata: trial balance (TB) linked, formula-derived, or manually overridden free text. Each TB-linked cell shows the specific trial balance account or grouping it references, so every financial statement line item drills down to the underlying evidence. A reviewer tracing a number no longer opens a second tab or another workpaper to see where it came from, since it all lives inside the same document. That distinction sounds small, but it's the foundation everything else builds on: a cell's provenance is what makes tie-out and review validation possible later, and it isn't something a Word- or Excel-based tool can attach after the fact. And because the linkage is live, not a snapshot, the report stays connected to the trial balance, or other sourced data, for the life of the engagement.

Where the auditor stays in the loop

Drafting Agent doesn't remove the preparer from the process; it's built to hand off cleanly to one. Its lineage drill-down exists specifically so a preparer can review with judgment instead of starting from a blank page or template. Free-text and override cells stay clearly marked as such, so nobody mistakes a manual entry for a linked one. Drafting Agent drafts and links; the preparer decides what stays, what changes, and what still needs auditor judgment.

A report drafted sooner, with less assembly required

Previously, an associate would spend two or three days of fieldwork on the statement's mechanical shell: pulling last year's report, updating dates, reformatting columns and footnotes, rebuilding tables that broke when a note was added or removed, then re-keying trial balance values one at a time.

With Field Financials’ Drafting Agent, that same associate starts from a structurally complete, current-year-linked draft on day one. The hours that used to go into assembly go into reviewing the numbers the agent has already linked and into the other parts of the engagement that actually require judgment. That's engagement capacity that doesn't depend on hiring additional headcount, and it shows up on day one of fieldwork rather than at the end in preparation for report issuance.

As Field Financials expands over the coming months, the Tie-Out Agent and Disclosure Agents will extend this same data layer to automated reviews for mathematical accuracy and report consistency, as well as to disclosure footnote preparation and completeness checks. What's available today is the foundation both depend on: a document and a trial balance that are natively connected in the same system.

See Field Financials in action

Book a demo and walk through Drafting Agent’s capabilities with real-world financial statements.