How Sanville & Co passed a PCAOB inspection with zero comment forms in under a year with Fieldguide
Key Results at a Glance
- With more than 3,400 team members, Aprio is betting its audit engagement modernization on an end-to-end unified platform.
- Full visibility into the agent's reasoning turned team members into AI believers, growing the relationship from a proof-of-concept problem into a co-build collaboration.
- Team members and leaders spend more time on complex audit work and building client relationships.
About Aprio
Aprio, founded in 1952 and headquartered in Atlanta, is the 20th largest business advisory and accounting firm in the United States, with more than 3,400 audit, tax, advisory, talent, and wealth professionals across 49+ offices globally. The firm has grown quickly in recent years, in part through a steady series of firm mergers. Leading Aprio's audit modernization effort are Holly Voight, Senior Manager of Assurance Operations, who oversees strategic initiatives and software vendor relationships for the practice, and Becky Fuller, Director of Assurance Technology & Integration, who drives technology adoption across the audit & assurance practice and leads the technical integration of merged-in firms.
Aprio's Growth Outpaced Its Software Stack
Aprio's growth through acquisition created a logistics problem: every merged firm arrived with its own audit software and its own way of doing things. "Previously, a number of our systems didn't talk to each other," Holly said. "You’d have to go to one system to update your workflow, another to get document request lists from clients, and another to manage an engagement’s trial balance. You're logging in and out of a lot of different systems, and it makes it very hard for new team members and incoming firms to learn."
When Aprio began evaluating other technology solutions, the ask was simple: one platform, not a mix of tools with limited integrations with each other. "We just kept saying we want an all-in-one platform, and nobody has it," Holly said. "We piloted a lot of different software platforms that claim to have that, and we felt they all fell short."
Earning Trust Before Earning the Business
At the end of 2025, Aprio signed on for a proof of concept, and pushed Fieldguide to prove itself before the relationship went any further. "Last November we were skeptical of Fieldguide," Holly said. So the firm asked Fieldguide to fix one real problem they were facing, on Aprio's terms, before expanding the deal. The problem they picked was consolidations.
Fieldguide's team took on the challenge, asked detailed questions throughout the process, and delivered a working solution on the promised timeline, better than expected. That early win, inside a compressed proof-of-concept window, became the model for how the two companies still work together: a practice-wide co-build collaboration, in which Aprio's own audit methodology gets built directly into Field Auditor, which performs substantive audit procedures, grounded in firm-specific knowledge.
Trust still had to be built at the individual auditor level. "Auditors are skeptical by nature; that's their job," Holly said. "They're going to say, how did it come up with that number?" What made the difference, she said, was visibility into the agent's reasoning. "Something Fieldguide uniquely did was show the agent working, show that thought process behind it," Holly said. A practitioner could understand the logic behind any audit procedure performed and use their own professional judgment to confirm the work was completed correctly. That transparency matters. Aprio’s philosophy is that a team has to review anything an agent outputs and take responsibility for it when they sign off on a workpaper. "At the end of the day, AI does not replace your judgment," she said. "Auditor judgment and human intelligence remain essential."
Scaling the Co-Build Toward a Shared Vision
The clearest evidence the approach is working shows up in firm adoption, not just delivery dates. Becky pointed to a recent Fieldguide onsite as the clearest proof point so far: watching Fieldguide's Search for Unrecorded Liabilities agent work in person and produce a completed workpaper. "It was absolutely mind-blowing," she said. Becky framed the payoff in terms of what practitioners get back, not just what the software does: associates and managers spend less time on formatting or basic comments from a reviewer and more time on the accounting and complex audit work they were trained to do.
That extra time shows up on the client side too. “They get a better quality audit, and they have more confidence that the numbers are correct,” Becky said. “We're able to give them better suggestions for how to improve their business because we spend more time with them, instead of just doing tests of details.” Additionally, partners can allocate more of their time to developing client relationships. "Yes, they're engaging us to do an audit and to issue an opinion on their financial statements," Becky said, "but at the end of the day, it's the relationship."
The scope of Fieldguide and Aprio's co-build collaboration continues to expand. Becky is looking forward to working with the Fieldguide team to develop the agentic financial statement workflow next. "Financial statements are my passion. How can we deliver a best-in-class financial statement preparation process?" she said. "Whether that means an easier report roll forward or minimizing the number of manual overrides, a practitioner should only have to enter something manually one time, and then it carries through everything else."
Holly sees the collaboration in broader terms. "Our CEO has talked a lot about how Aprio can make an impact on the accounting profession," she said. "Maybe our competitors benefit too, but we're making an impact on the industry as a whole; maybe even getting more college students, the next generation of accountants, excited about a career in accounting." For a firm that keeps growing by bringing new practices into the fold, working with a technology partner who shares that same ambition for the profession is becoming just as important as the growth itself.
