A new draft of the financial statement always seems to land at the worst point in the cycle: the week before sign-off, when every hour is already spoken for and a partner is waiting on a clean file. Normally, that draft means starting the review over: tick marks copied by hand, findings scattered across Excel sheets, pages re-read that the team already cleared.

Studio FSX treats the financial statement as one object across every version, from first draft to signed set. When a new draft lands, completed work carries forward, and the team reviews what changed instead of the whole statement again. Across the last few drafts before sign-off, that turns a full re-review into a short one.

In the audit toolkit since July

For teams already using Studio FSX, it handles the mechanical work, so they can spend their time on judgments calls. These are the checks already automated in live engagements:

• Mathematical accuracy. Calculations across tables, notes and disclosures, checked automatically, with deviations shown in context.

• Internal consistency. Figures compared across the statement, notes and disclosures, with mismatches flagged at both the source and destination.

• Prior-year comparison. Current-year comparatives checked against the signed prior year before sign-off.

• Version comparison. Studio FSX flags what's different between drafts, so your team reviews only what changed.

For every engagement, four things stay visible: what's checked, what's changed, what's flagged and what's ready for sign-off. Setup takes under two hours for a standard template, and the structure carries over to the next engagement.

What’s new in this release

Two features join the list on November 1, inspired by the feedback from the firms already running Studio FSX since July.

The Reports tab records of the checks performed and how each finding was resolved: who raised it, who closed it, and when. It exports to Excel or PDF, so it drops straight into the review trail alongside the rest of the evidence.

Mathematical accuracy and internal consistency on prior-year columns. Until now, FSX checked the current year’s figures and compared them against the signed prior year. It now runs the same mathematical accuracy and internal consistency checks on the prior-year columns, catching any mismatch before anyone touches the current draft.

Management report checks the management or board report against the financial statement, catching mismatches in tables and narrative figures. Mathematical accuracy and internal consistency run as they do in Studio FSX, alongside financial statement consistency check, specifically built for this comparison.

Disclosure checklist is on the way in Q4. For every question in the firm’s template for the checklist, it ticks the box with reference to the exact evidence. These answers are marked for review by auditors before they’re committed to the final version.

What audit teams say about Studio FSX

Joinson&Spice has been running Studio FSX since its early design-partner days. Gerke van Garderen, Head of Innovation at Joinson&Spice, describes it as the tool their team now reaches for first on financial statement audit engagements.

"For me, that's where it starts to feel more like magic."

"When a client sends a new version, FSX flags what changed and carries our completed work forward, so we only review the bigger changes and can track every comment: was it closed, was it followed up? That became useful in ways we hadn't expected when we started using the tool a year and a half ago. It grew out of our feedback, and probably other firms too."

Studio FSX is available to every audit team starting November 1. Already a RobotX customer? Reach out to your Customer Success contact and get set up.

See it on your own financial statement →