How to Automate Suralink

The request list is the audit's real project plan

Suralink is the request-to-review platform accounting firms use to run the document side of an engagement. Audit, tax, advisory and internal audit teams work in it, from regional practices up to national ones, and so does everybody on the other side: the client's controller, their accounts payable clerk, whoever holds the leases.

The object at the center of it is the PBC list, short for provided by client. It is the itemized list of everything the firm needs before it can do any work: the bank confirmations, the fixed asset register, the aged debtor listing, the board minutes, the lease agreements, the payroll reconciliation. Before a platform like this, that list lived in a spreadsheet emailed back and forth, with attachments in three inboxes and no agreed current version.

The list is the plan. If it is complete, fieldwork happens. If it is not, the engagement sits still and the deadline does not move.

Fieldwork stalls on the one item nobody uploaded

An engagement rarely fails on the hard technical question. It slips because eleven of the ninety requests are still open on a Thursday, and four are the ones everything else depends on.

The senior sends a reminder Monday. Wednesday they open the engagement to see whether anything came in. Something did, but it is the prior year's file, or a PDF of a screenshot, or one file of the three. So they look, they judge, and they write another email.

Multiply that by every engagement a manager carries and the checking is a job in itself. Then there is what the platform was never asked to hold: confirmations sent through a confirmation service, the client's accounting system the trial balance has to tie back to, and budget against actual hours in the practice management system.

None of it is skilled work. It is work that only stops happening when a person stops doing it.

Suralink

One overdue list across the book Open requests from every live engagement in one page, ordered by age and by whoever is blocked waiting on them.

Clients that have gone quiet Portals with no activity for a week flagged by name, because silence is the earliest warning an engagement is slipping.

Uploads checked against the ask The prior year's file, the listing that stops in November, the request marked done with one attachment out of three.

Suralink tracks the request, not the answer

Suralink solves the coordination problem properly, and a firm should be using all of it before wanting more.

The dynamic request list keeps every item in one place with an owner, a due date and a live status, updating as the client uploads. Templates and rollovers rebuild next year's list from this year's, or import the spreadsheet a team already has, which is usually the moment a firm stops emailing attachments. An approval workflow lets the preparer accept a completed request or send it back as incomplete, with pinned comments and chat kept on the document rather than an inbox. Real-time dashboards show status across an engagement, instant notifications fire on activity, and an audit trail records who did what.

All of that describes the state of the list. What it does not describe is the state of the audit.

Suralink can tell you a request is open. It cannot tell you that the bank confirmation came back on the confirmation provider's site, that the client's accounting system now shows a different trial balance than the one uploaded in week one, or that this engagement is forty hours over budget.

Each open engagement can report its own gaps

Monday's scramble becomes one page, compiled overnight.

Every live engagement swept in one pass, with overdue requests listed by client and by manager, ranked by how long they have been sitting and whether anything downstream is blocked behind them. Client portals with no activity for a week flagged by name, because silence is the earliest signal an engagement is about to slip and the last thing anybody checks.

Uploaded documents checked against what was actually asked for: a file whose period is the prior year, a listing that stops at November, a request marked complete with one attachment where three were requested. Outstanding confirmations followed on the confirmation provider's own site until the response lands, so the file gets closed on evidence rather than on memory.

Budget against actual hours pulled from the practice management system and set beside the share of requests still open, the most honest early warning that an engagement is going wrong.

The reminders themselves sit drafted and waiting. A chase to a client is a relationship, and it goes out over a person's name.

Follow-up should not be the senior's morning

Two things happen when a senior opens an engagement to chase it: a list gets compiled, and a judgement gets made about how hard to push a client who has gone quiet. Only the second one needed the exam.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Suralink, the confirmation site, the practice management system and the client's own portal, reads the state of each, and hands back one worklist: what is overdue, what came back wrong, who has gone quiet.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. It does not accept or reject a request on the firm's behalf, and nothing goes to a client without a person reading it first.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.