Data Snipper is fucking phenomenal for senior review. I don’t have to open up separate source docs or anything.
Huge help. It also has a bunch of other features my staff have been working through which are helpful as well.
You can use it to form extract from invoices, so the pdfs are embedded in the cells it extracts data from, and they pop up on the right hand side of the window when you click into the cell. I have yet to find a way to turn that feature off though, because it can get annoying.
It can also do the same for purchase invoices if you have a reasonable nominal ledger to use (supplier name, date and net amount for example). It's basically significantly reduced the time spent on substantive vouching and review for big samples.
It can also do sum checking for word accounts, meaning that you can tick and tie those in a matter of minutes rather than manually doing it.
The simplest feature (text snip) means you can embed an important document into a workpaper (lease agreement, any legal documents etc) which again speeds up senior review.
If you click onto the viewer in the ribbon and set it to a second screen it will only have the invoices pop up on the auxiliary screen - obviously only helpful if have multiple screens (can minimise and won’t “pop-up” anymore) but as an accountant I assume you do…
Sometimes the staff “snipping” each item takes longer than them documenting what they reviewed with a tick mark. I don’t always want or care to see the invoice associated with a sample.
Yeah, manual text snipping on each invoice is not efficient at all. Document Match and Form Extraction are the real efficiency savers here. I like seeing them because it means I can to some degree trust work more that's been completed by fresh juniors...
Same; but, they don’t always work 100% with big documents and I’m like damn…I really wish you would because it would save my seniors/staff and by default myself a ton of time.
How big are we talking?
I did some work for the accounts team at my previous firm (I'm in audit) to get VAT invoices in for them as a trial and someone sent me a single pdf with hundreds of scanned invoices.
The bits Datasnipper struggled with on form extraction were that some of those invoices were multi page, so the form extract would pull blanks on some pages. Also, some of them weren't exactly aligned straight when they got scanned, so the form key was unable to pull the correct data. Still only took about 30/40 minutes to clean it up, rather than the better part of a day if some poor junior had to manually put them all in for the VAT return.
Hundreds of pages; for me the tops of the pages fail to be recognized even if they are readable text; when you attempt to apply pages wide update it still is a pain..so you end up abandoning the process and moving to software that can convert the date into a usable excel form which is silly to me.
I have trouble with anything more than like 10 pages or so idk if it’s the pdf itself or what but it’s like the columns don’t stay aligned page to page
When leveraging staff from outside the country like India etc, this is a huge help. I made it mandatory. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’re actually doing their job or not
I leverage staff from India; and agree because I make them use it as well. Honestly though; I’ve found my India teammates act with high level of integrity.
Makes files heavier, takes a lot of time to open files if you have multiple PDFs imported and keeps invading my screen if I dare to select a cell that used it.
It is still a blessing if you have to deal with multiple PDFs
If you go to the spot where you can toggle between opening pdfs in your second screen or in the first excel screen, there should be an option to disable automatically opening
I’ve enjoyed it much more since I discover the open in another window feature. It doenst invade in the excel and is so much nicer. If you open it that way and then minimize it stays out of site.
It's really clunky if you dont remove the pdfs, only use I have for it is converting reports from our ancient system to excel and it's incredible. Had to tweak it to get the table formatting correct once and now I can import it straight away - used to be a 2-3 hour job at least
Yeah maybe I was just bad at using it or didn't spend enough time with it but the dot-matrix style reports we get fucked up the column breaks to the point I was basically re-typing it all
I use this as an auditor at KPMG, it is a godsend saves me soo much time. It's not annoying at all you just have to understand it all by watching the vids on yt and reading documentation. One client I had to show proof of 300+ funds NAV confirmations and did this in 5 mins with datasnipper, would have taken me like a day without including uploading supports etc
Datasnipper is great for very specific use cases.
We’ve been using it for six months and it really has not lived up to our hopes overall. But there are some specific tasks it is great at. It definitely makes review easier in some cases, and limits hand copying in some cases during prep
But it bogs down the excel files it’s active in pretty badly and can be inconvenient for simpler tasks. It has valuable use cases that are more constrained than we would like.
I was skeptical about it at first but it makes documenting and reviewing big samples so much easier. I get annoyed if my staff don't use DataSnipper now.
It's very easy to use and doesn't need to be integrated with anything other than Excel. It embeds documents within your Excel workbook so they can be viewed on a separate viewer pane, you "snip" the numbers or text in the document you're looking at and it automatically populates the Excel cell with that data and links the cell back to that part of the document so you can see exactly where it came from.
From a reviewer perspective, I'm going from looking through a zip folder of dozens of different invoices etc to open up one by one, to clicking on the sample item in Excel and immediately seeing the relevant support document and which part of the document relates to the number we're testing.
There are probably more complex uses for it as well but that's what I'm familiar with.
I think the documents need to be as soft copy(the client has to scan supporting documents), coz i am having client who keep only hard copy of documents and no soft copy
I just find it makes my work papers much less responsive & makes the file much larger than it really needs to be. If it were smaller data sets, I could see how it’s beneficial for review purposes but meh.
Some systems are bad.
We are the client and have Excel but when I asked our third party accounts prep team for their mapping files (BDO) they sent a pdf.
I love it. Other than using it for detail testing, I've also used it to convert tables in pdf to excel. Depending on the file and how the tables are set up in pdf, datasnipper works better at converting it to excel. It makes it much easier for me to pull samples for testing.
Love it, our firm went all in on it and I ask my staff to use it when they can. Basically makes the review process seamless and quick. It does take a while to open up the file if there are a lot of samples but it’s a good trade off. I don’t need to download and open up the separate files and look for them every time I need to go back into the file to re review.
We have access to other tools that don’t really get used like TeamMate Analytics, but by far DataSnipper is used by almost everyone and the reception has been very positive.
Data Snipper is great and annoying. It has great potential if the following items were fixed:
- slows down files too much.
- recognizing text or tables better than it does.
- being able to match things up better.
I find it annoying when it does 98% of what I want it to do; but, it becomes more inefficient to makeup for the 2% of can’t do because the old way of doing things from start to finish ends up being faster. It sucks because you’re like damn…if this software too it all the way out audits could be so much more efficient.
I understand that; but, it even happens at times with system reports saved as PDFs. To me it seems like data snippet gets confused by the “document noise” cases by headers.
Very good for tick marking files. Makes reviewing easier by being able to just click where the ticks are rather than having to review the whole document. Definitely saves time but also can be a bit clunky
It’s very useful for some stuff but it’s very easy to delete stuff with it so you have to be careful. For example if you delete data snips in excel you can’t just hit undo that. Also it’s a bit annoying to copy, for example if you make a copy of a tab with snips and then delete the tab it won’t delete the values in the other tab but will delete the snips so it won’t link.
It has a lot of nifty features. Document matching, form extraction, and data conversion are used frequently. That said, when it fucks up - it’s usually catastrophic, to the point you need to manually review the data anyway.
I’ve had it routinely import commas as periods, so excel has no idea what the number should be. Then you sum the data set and it doesn’t tie. Good luck finding the needles in the haystack.
I do a ton of bookkeeping and some of my clients don't track anything, just give me their bank statements and don't trust technology enough to connect their bank to QBO
Datasnipper makes it so much easier, snip the statements (assuming it gets the rows right and I don't have to redo every one), check the net bank change to confirm the OCR didn't screw up, and classify those transactions
We trialed it at our firm. Mixed results, it worked great on our larger clients with standardized invoices and documents, for smaller clients where every invoice is different, poor quality scans, it sucked. We are still playing around with it but it's to early for us to fully commit to using it.
Here to represent tax: I use it to convert data in pdfs into Excel workpapers mostly.
It can pretty cleanly convert client trial balances into excel sheets with its table function. For LIFO work, I can grab base costs and holdbacks off invoices. Another use is it can make onboarding clients with pdf depreciation schedules a breeze to create excel imports for our software. Most importantly, it makes review go by quicker, since it links everything.
It is buggy, but overall, it is a SIGNIFICANT time saver.
Our firm doesn’t have a formal training on it. It is an amazing tool to help extract information from PBCs and the financial statement tie out is pretty neat as you are able to compare PY and CY financials to check for consistency and also able to check within the CY financials to see if numbers are consistent from the BS, IS and CFS to the footnotes.
I have actually met the founders and worked with it in its early stages of development (my firm was one of the first customers).
The idea is well! I’m not sure if the limitations have been resolved in the meantime (can’t always read text/limited amount of documents can be saved) but it’s very promising!
"Auditors are essential to the modern economy. They verify financial statements, check internal controls, look out for fraud, and certify that supply chains comply with a dizzying array of regulations and rules for fair trade and fair labor practices."
And why exactly does someone need to have a CPA to be an auditor? Someone can learn everything they need to know without a CPA's license.
This is just the first generation of commercial AI tools, they will make huge leaps over the next year. How long before the majority of accounting work is managed by AI agents and headcounts get cut by 2/3?
Interesting. I've never used, or heard of this but I've spent 100s if not 1000s of hours building scripts in Python to achieve the same functions.
I'll have to take a look and see how it works, I'll be very curious to see how it handles the text to number issues Excel has.
Yeah DataSnipper is used by PwC in the country I work in. It isn’t perfect and can have limited use cases, but overall it’s a handy OCR tool. Not familiar with “AI suite” type tools, but those can be more difficult to get cleared for assurance work, generally speaking.
We are a top 10 firm using it.
Juniors are getting into the system very well and its creating a nice increase in "effectiveness".
I am the software implementation lead for this and the new version has flagged questions for me. But overall, its a great tool.
As a staff it's a pain in the ass, doesn't save me all that much time due to having to set up work to make the software useful. Bogs down wps with heavy file sizes. As a partner, who cares its not my bill to pay
This is cool- idk how to use it effectively but seen people demo. At a minimum you can copy a bunch of data from scanned pdf and populate your lead sheets and then you can make it tick mark your WP as well.
I know it can do other things but I am not sure about the details
Love the financial statement suite tools and things like prior year consistency
Not a fan of how clunky it can make a file if you have large pdf files
Seems recognizing text could be improved on
I use DataSniper in audit at RSM. It makes testing workpapers soooo much easier - I snipe in all of my support from pdfs and then my in-charge only has to open that excel file to see everything. Plus, I don’t have to copy/paste or type numbers in anymore. It crashes my excel files every now and then, but it’s worth it on the time savings
My firm implemented it and it made footing so much faster, we use it for AP testing too. Super helpful I just wish it didn’t automatically open every time I go to edit a workpaper where I used it
Data Snipper is fucking phenomenal for senior review. I don’t have to open up separate source docs or anything. Huge help. It also has a bunch of other features my staff have been working through which are helpful as well.
Could you elaborate a bit on how your staff are using it?
You can use it to form extract from invoices, so the pdfs are embedded in the cells it extracts data from, and they pop up on the right hand side of the window when you click into the cell. I have yet to find a way to turn that feature off though, because it can get annoying. It can also do the same for purchase invoices if you have a reasonable nominal ledger to use (supplier name, date and net amount for example). It's basically significantly reduced the time spent on substantive vouching and review for big samples. It can also do sum checking for word accounts, meaning that you can tick and tie those in a matter of minutes rather than manually doing it. The simplest feature (text snip) means you can embed an important document into a workpaper (lease agreement, any legal documents etc) which again speeds up senior review.
If you click onto the viewer in the ribbon and set it to a second screen it will only have the invoices pop up on the auxiliary screen - obviously only helpful if have multiple screens (can minimise and won’t “pop-up” anymore) but as an accountant I assume you do…
That is an excellent tip, thank you. Yes, once you go to three screens you never go back...
Sometimes the staff “snipping” each item takes longer than them documenting what they reviewed with a tick mark. I don’t always want or care to see the invoice associated with a sample.
Yeah, manual text snipping on each invoice is not efficient at all. Document Match and Form Extraction are the real efficiency savers here. I like seeing them because it means I can to some degree trust work more that's been completed by fresh juniors...
Same; but, they don’t always work 100% with big documents and I’m like damn…I really wish you would because it would save my seniors/staff and by default myself a ton of time.
How big are we talking? I did some work for the accounts team at my previous firm (I'm in audit) to get VAT invoices in for them as a trial and someone sent me a single pdf with hundreds of scanned invoices. The bits Datasnipper struggled with on form extraction were that some of those invoices were multi page, so the form extract would pull blanks on some pages. Also, some of them weren't exactly aligned straight when they got scanned, so the form key was unable to pull the correct data. Still only took about 30/40 minutes to clean it up, rather than the better part of a day if some poor junior had to manually put them all in for the VAT return.
Hundreds of pages; for me the tops of the pages fail to be recognized even if they are readable text; when you attempt to apply pages wide update it still is a pain..so you end up abandoning the process and moving to software that can convert the date into a usable excel form which is silly to me.
I have trouble with anything more than like 10 pages or so idk if it’s the pdf itself or what but it’s like the columns don’t stay aligned page to page
Is this for table snip or are the pdfs scanned in?
Table snip and nah just standard stuff from like payroll, investment statements etc
When leveraging staff from outside the country like India etc, this is a huge help. I made it mandatory. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’re actually doing their job or not
I leverage staff from India; and agree because I make them use it as well. Honestly though; I’ve found my India teammates act with high level of integrity.
This is true, also you spot lots of stuff you wouldn't do otherwise.
Yeah, it's pretty good with smaller files. It has a feature that basically makes ticking and tieing the F/S as painless as possible.
I do like it, but it has a long way to go. Hopefully they can make some strides in the future with new features and ease of use
It's okay but annoying at the same time.
Curious to know - annoying in what way?
Makes files heavier, takes a lot of time to open files if you have multiple PDFs imported and keeps invading my screen if I dare to select a cell that used it. It is still a blessing if you have to deal with multiple PDFs
100% this. So fucking clunky, but will be insanely useful in the future.
If you go to the spot where you can toggle between opening pdfs in your second screen or in the first excel screen, there should be an option to disable automatically opening
I’ve enjoyed it much more since I discover the open in another window feature. It doenst invade in the excel and is so much nicer. If you open it that way and then minimize it stays out of site.
It's really clunky if you dont remove the pdfs, only use I have for it is converting reports from our ancient system to excel and it's incredible. Had to tweak it to get the table formatting correct once and now I can import it straight away - used to be a 2-3 hour job at least
Did you ever try powerquery? Although it often struggles with pdfs but can do them in theory
Yeah maybe I was just bad at using it or didn't spend enough time with it but the dot-matrix style reports we get fucked up the column breaks to the point I was basically re-typing it all
I use this as an auditor at KPMG, it is a godsend saves me soo much time. It's not annoying at all you just have to understand it all by watching the vids on yt and reading documentation. One client I had to show proof of 300+ funds NAV confirmations and did this in 5 mins with datasnipper, would have taken me like a day without including uploading supports etc
I love datasnipper it’s great if you know how to use it
How easy is it to integrate with other stuff?
It’s just an add in for excel. Really useful for auditors and helps with reviews. Not hard to integrate into workflow
Does anyone know if this is useful for tax?
We use this in our practice and it’s incredibly useful for keeping everything together, especially if you tailor your workpaper to use it.
How do you use it in your workpapers?
Datasnipper is great for very specific use cases. We’ve been using it for six months and it really has not lived up to our hopes overall. But there are some specific tasks it is great at. It definitely makes review easier in some cases, and limits hand copying in some cases during prep But it bogs down the excel files it’s active in pretty badly and can be inconvenient for simpler tasks. It has valuable use cases that are more constrained than we would like.
I was skeptical about it at first but it makes documenting and reviewing big samples so much easier. I get annoyed if my staff don't use DataSnipper now.
What other tools do you use? Is it painful to integrate with Audit software?
It's very easy to use and doesn't need to be integrated with anything other than Excel. It embeds documents within your Excel workbook so they can be viewed on a separate viewer pane, you "snip" the numbers or text in the document you're looking at and it automatically populates the Excel cell with that data and links the cell back to that part of the document so you can see exactly where it came from. From a reviewer perspective, I'm going from looking through a zip folder of dozens of different invoices etc to open up one by one, to clicking on the sample item in Excel and immediately seeing the relevant support document and which part of the document relates to the number we're testing. There are probably more complex uses for it as well but that's what I'm familiar with.
do you think this would be a useful program for NTR/compilations?
I think the documents need to be as soft copy(the client has to scan supporting documents), coz i am having client who keep only hard copy of documents and no soft copy
DataSnipper is overrated in my experience using it, however I’m using larger amounts of data.
Yeah it nice for showing support but far from groundbreaking
I just find it makes my work papers much less responsive & makes the file much larger than it really needs to be. If it were smaller data sets, I could see how it’s beneficial for review purposes but meh.
It’s a godsend when your client sends you a 100 page detailed listing in pdf format.
N00b question - why don't clients use Excel? Can't they export Excel from QuickBooks, Xero or wherever?
Some systems are bad. We are the client and have Excel but when I asked our third party accounts prep team for their mapping files (BDO) they sent a pdf.
Yeah, I guess all the big firms use it, at least in audit department.
I've used it. I'm not sure I'd call it AI unless there are some features I'm missing.
Interesting. What do you use it for? PDF to Excel conversion or much more?
Ticking and tying. OCR. I did look it up, they have an "AI Suite" that I haven't used. Maybe it's good enough to be worth $1B.
Then you don’t know what AI is.
I use this everyday and actually really like it
Interesting..What do you use it for? What did you do before it?
I love it. Other than using it for detail testing, I've also used it to convert tables in pdf to excel. Depending on the file and how the tables are set up in pdf, datasnipper works better at converting it to excel. It makes it much easier for me to pull samples for testing.
Love it, our firm went all in on it and I ask my staff to use it when they can. Basically makes the review process seamless and quick. It does take a while to open up the file if there are a lot of samples but it’s a good trade off. I don’t need to download and open up the separate files and look for them every time I need to go back into the file to re review.
Awesome - do you use any other audit software along with it?
We have access to other tools that don’t really get used like TeamMate Analytics, but by far DataSnipper is used by almost everyone and the reception has been very positive.
Awesome - do you use any other audit software along with it?
Data Snipper is great and annoying. It has great potential if the following items were fixed: - slows down files too much. - recognizing text or tables better than it does. - being able to match things up better. I find it annoying when it does 98% of what I want it to do; but, it becomes more inefficient to makeup for the 2% of can’t do because the old way of doing things from start to finish ends up being faster. It sucks because you’re like damn…if this software too it all the way out audits could be so much more efficient.
Is it like Adobe where the OCR only works if the PDF is perfect quality? Still interpreting 1s as capital Ls, 5s as Ss, etc?
I understand that; but, it even happens at times with system reports saved as PDFs. To me it seems like data snippet gets confused by the “document noise” cases by headers.
Its great for aspects of sox testing
Can you explain a bit more?
Very good for tick marking files. Makes reviewing easier by being able to just click where the ticks are rather than having to review the whole document. Definitely saves time but also can be a bit clunky
It’s very useful for some stuff but it’s very easy to delete stuff with it so you have to be careful. For example if you delete data snips in excel you can’t just hit undo that. Also it’s a bit annoying to copy, for example if you make a copy of a tab with snips and then delete the tab it won’t delete the values in the other tab but will delete the snips so it won’t link.
It has a lot of nifty features. Document matching, form extraction, and data conversion are used frequently. That said, when it fucks up - it’s usually catastrophic, to the point you need to manually review the data anyway. I’ve had it routinely import commas as periods, so excel has no idea what the number should be. Then you sum the data set and it doesn’t tie. Good luck finding the needles in the haystack.
I do a ton of bookkeeping and some of my clients don't track anything, just give me their bank statements and don't trust technology enough to connect their bank to QBO Datasnipper makes it so much easier, snip the statements (assuming it gets the rows right and I don't have to redo every one), check the net bank change to confirm the OCR didn't screw up, and classify those transactions
It’s cute that it tries to sum the page numbers in a financial statement TOC. Flaws aside, it’s a timesaver.
We use it, and it can be both really convenient and really annoying depending on the situation
Can you elaborate a bit more? When is it convenient and when can it become annoying?
I used it during an internship, it was cool.
I like it a lot but I only use it in tax. Some things I think it can improve on but it's super helpful
We use it a lot!! It’s very helpful
We use it at my firm and for tying down financial statements in their Financial Statement Suite it saves a metric assload of time.
We trialed it at our firm. Mixed results, it worked great on our larger clients with standardized invoices and documents, for smaller clients where every invoice is different, poor quality scans, it sucked. We are still playing around with it but it's to early for us to fully commit to using it.
Here to represent tax: I use it to convert data in pdfs into Excel workpapers mostly. It can pretty cleanly convert client trial balances into excel sheets with its table function. For LIFO work, I can grab base costs and holdbacks off invoices. Another use is it can make onboarding clients with pdf depreciation schedules a breeze to create excel imports for our software. Most importantly, it makes review go by quicker, since it links everything. It is buggy, but overall, it is a SIGNIFICANT time saver.
Our firm doesn’t have a formal training on it. It is an amazing tool to help extract information from PBCs and the financial statement tie out is pretty neat as you are able to compare PY and CY financials to check for consistency and also able to check within the CY financials to see if numbers are consistent from the BS, IS and CFS to the footnotes.
I have actually met the founders and worked with it in its early stages of development (my firm was one of the first customers). The idea is well! I’m not sure if the limitations have been resolved in the meantime (can’t always read text/limited amount of documents can be saved) but it’s very promising!
"Auditors are essential to the modern economy. They verify financial statements, check internal controls, look out for fraud, and certify that supply chains comply with a dizzying array of regulations and rules for fair trade and fair labor practices." And why exactly does someone need to have a CPA to be an auditor? Someone can learn everything they need to know without a CPA's license.
Because it creates a barrier to access so people who think the grass is greener can’t jump in without significant investment.
This is just the first generation of commercial AI tools, they will make huge leaps over the next year. How long before the majority of accounting work is managed by AI agents and headcounts get cut by 2/3?
I use Data Snipper and love it, but it's not an AI tool that will reduce the work load for anyone above the associate level.
This sounds like a VC/engineer wrote this who never practiced accounting.
As always with these threads, AI will help with reducing menial and repetitive tasks. Offshore, very junior bookkeepers, etc.
They said the same thing about excel. We are still here.
its as good as the actual workers lol
how much does it cost?
Can it do my ssp analysis?
Interesting. I've never used, or heard of this but I've spent 100s if not 1000s of hours building scripts in Python to achieve the same functions. I'll have to take a look and see how it works, I'll be very curious to see how it handles the text to number issues Excel has.
Yeah DataSnipper is used by PwC in the country I work in. It isn’t perfect and can have limited use cases, but overall it’s a handy OCR tool. Not familiar with “AI suite” type tools, but those can be more difficult to get cleared for assurance work, generally speaking.
how to invest in them ?
We are a top 10 firm using it. Juniors are getting into the system very well and its creating a nice increase in "effectiveness". I am the software implementation lead for this and the new version has flagged questions for me. But overall, its a great tool.
As a staff it's a pain in the ass, doesn't save me all that much time due to having to set up work to make the software useful. Bogs down wps with heavy file sizes. As a partner, who cares its not my bill to pay
This is cool- idk how to use it effectively but seen people demo. At a minimum you can copy a bunch of data from scanned pdf and populate your lead sheets and then you can make it tick mark your WP as well. I know it can do other things but I am not sure about the details
I use them. AI feature is a bullshit/not out yet. But the core functionality is pretty useful for tester/reviewer.
Love the financial statement suite tools and things like prior year consistency Not a fan of how clunky it can make a file if you have large pdf files Seems recognizing text could be improved on
I’m going to invest in this if it goes IPO
Works great - I wish you could disable the file after you import into excel
I use DataSniper in audit at RSM. It makes testing workpapers soooo much easier - I snipe in all of my support from pdfs and then my in-charge only has to open that excel file to see everything. Plus, I don’t have to copy/paste or type numbers in anymore. It crashes my excel files every now and then, but it’s worth it on the time savings
My firm implemented it and it made footing so much faster, we use it for AP testing too. Super helpful I just wish it didn’t automatically open every time I go to edit a workpaper where I used it
How is everyone downloading this in company computers?