Thursday 4 January - Boston

Another full day of training. Libe left for New York City via a Greyhound bus early in the morning, to begin our 3 months of solitary confinement. I think she'd been quite enjoying taking it pretty easy in Boston too.

Got introduced to ePace, Vitale's version of PP's Caseware. It has a few nuances to it: the terms 'binders', 'synchronisation' and 'local file room' will become familiar, as will the process of 'assigning' editor rights. Time will tell - it's obviously early - however it appears as though Caseware is further advanced. Points of note:

• Importing the TB is quite complicated, as is mapping the TB and creating leadsheets. There's actually quite a lot of risk in the import of the TB; any errors sound like they can cause simple problems, hence it appears as though it is the seniors on the audit that will do this. Obviously with Caseware, you just re-import the TB in case of errors, and leadsheets are automatically created, hence its a grad's work.
• In ePace, the "financials" are excel documents with only the basic reports - Balance Sheet, P&L, Equity statement - which are then transformed into financials by another department, while in Caseware they are largely automatically generated via the import of the TB.
• It's more difficult to get a copy of the audit file through ePace. However, although the synchronisation process is a little complicated, it does eliminate the risk of two people working on the same document at the same time.
  

In other, more important, news, there's a bloke from Vitale that looks like Darryl Kerrigan. Out of respect, I won't post his photo here, but Pete did agree, and I reckon Glenn may too.