Suralink - Avis

A massive time saver for CPAs and their clients

Commentaires : It has provided a higher level of professionalism to our information request process while greatly reducing the administrative burden of tracking information requests.

Avantages :

Extremely user friendly, minimal training needed for staff or clients.

Inconvénients :

The only issue that we have had to date has been clients using extremely old web browsers, which is hard to label as a Suralink issue.

Suralink Enhances and Simplifies Audit Evidence Collection Process

Commentaires : Overall we've really enjoyed using Suralink and recommend it to all. Support is great too. Easily add licenses as needed.

Avantages :

Gone are the days of having a DRL or PBC that you manage in an Excel spreadsheet over e-mail or in a Dropbox, Box, or Sharepoint. Suralink does it for you with individual line items for each request, easy drag & drop to upload files, easily download all or just new files, track status, assign owners to requests, make requests private, and more. Can be used for any audit or advisory project where you need evidence from the client. Pay per firm user. Storage is unlimited, client engagements are unlimited.

Inconvénients :

Suralink is still developing new functionality. Just released some new APIs that should help. Security only has 2 levels: Staff or Manager.

Suralink Review

Commentaires : Our overall experience with Suralink has been positive.

Avantages :

What I like most about Suralink is that it keeps us very organized during audit. Each year, we can see the previous items requested/sent.

Inconvénients :

What I like least about Suralink is when you are trying to load multiple items or one very large item, the software will timeout and not let you know it did not update.

Suralink: Wiss/WEST Growth

Avantages :

It works. I do not have experience with other software's so not certain how to compare. It would be great if it could integrate with iChannel

Inconvénients :

I work for WEST Growth, LLC which is a subsidiary of Wiss and Company, LLP. I do not have any other experience with secure portal except for Suralink so I am not sure how useful my opinion is, however, I have several clients who complain about the UI. Basically, it is not very straightforward/learning curve involved.

Seamless Collaboration with Suralink

Commentaires : Overall, I am very pleased with my experience using Suralink. The user-friendly interface combined with the powerful collaboration tools make it the perfect choice for teams that need to get work done quickly and without any hassle.

Avantages :

I recently switched over to Suralink for all my online collaboration needs and I have been very pleased with the service so far. The interface is incredibly intuitive and the features make it easy to work with my team. The real-time comments and editing features are especially helpful and make it a breeze to get everyone on the same page quickly.

Inconvénients :

The only downside I have experienced with Suralink is the occasional bugs. I have had a few documents take longer than normal to load or had some formatting issues when sharing a document with multiple users. However, these issues have been few and far between and have been quickly resolved with the help of the customer support team.

Best PBC Request/File Share Site I Have Used

Commentaires : Exceptional. I've used a few different PBC request/file share sites and none of them have come close

Avantages :

Very simple to use, the client view is just like the audit team view so I can walk them through the site, easy to upload, has almost every feature we were looking for, and they are constantly upgrading based on my feedback

Inconvénients :

No setup to send automatic status updates to clients throughout an engagement. Must remember to send them manually

Efficiency and Clarity

Commentaires : I am all in on this app. My clients are appreciating it too.
Efficiency on our side and theirs is up.

Avantages :

I really like the ability to go in, as an audit manager, and get an idea of the status of the audit is. I can see how responsive the client is. I can see how responsive staff is being. This allows me to focus on my attention on the clients that are being responsive. This is very important during busy season. I am constantly in Suralink during busy season, even if staff is doing the interacting with the client. I am also quickly finding the power of the status reports that are sent out to the client and I am beginning to only send communication to the client through the status report function rather than email from Outlook.

Inconvénients :

The process of switching from one engagement to another takes one or two steps more than I would like. Maybe having a tool/navigation bar on the side could help.

Completely streamlined audit process

Avantages :

Our organization is extremely complex due to the fact that we have a large number of Legal Entities. The ability to create Audit PBC templates and simply copy those across all our entities in mass has reduced the administrative burden to near-zero time spent by our IT team. The administration is simple enough that our External Auditors own 95% of the process. Prior to adopting Suralink, this process was maintained on SharePoint and was an extremely burdensome process for our organization.

Inconvénients :

It would be nice to create dynamic PBCs based on a questionnaire. Often times the nature of our legal entities will create additional PBC items. This is ruled base and could be automated, but is manageable to manually track.

Excellent Tool

Commentaires : Suralink offers structure and a visual representation of the project progress for internal and external users. It allows us to track at any level of granularity depending on the project and the client.

Avantages :

Suralink offers the flexibility needed for any size company to properly customize the product to reflect core processes. The visual representation of the project progress is very appealing to me and my customers.

Inconvénients :

Depending on how structured the existing process is, it can be a little time consuming to setup the initial templates. But once the templates are configured, it is very quick to spin up a new project.

Suralink

Commentaires : My overall experience with Suralink was positive and I would recommend this product to others.

Avantages :

Does what you expect it to do without the unwanted surprises. Overall I felt my experience using Suralink to be pleasant.

Inconvénients :

This might be a bit picky, but the interface did not have the feel of a more contemporary mobile app. Again this is being picky because it proved to be effective.

Intuitive and Customizable

Commentaires : Because our product and process can be a bit complicated or hard to keep in order, Suralink is helpful to compartmentalize different aspects of the process. Marking requests as resolved or rejected is helpful to help our customers focus on the things that are most important.

Avantages :

Suralink is easy to learn; I haven't had any customers who are new to the software need help from me on how to navigate or upload/download documents which is a huge win! Our product that we provide to customers is totally unique per client, so having a fully customizable interface is required. Suralink allows this to happen quickly and easily with the option of cloning specific requests or engagements, if applicable to make work more efficient.

Inconvénients :

There are a few buys as far as display that could be improved: - Comments sometimes post or reload with huge bits of gibberish as part of the text and remain that way indefinitely as far as I can tell. The text will run off the window making the comment much less useful. - The functionality to mark the notifications as 'read' often doesn't update so it still has the unread icon even after confirming that things have been read multiple times.

A Great and Versatile Tool for Auditors

Commentaires : An auditor's best friend, it would be hard to go back.

Avantages :

Suralink is a great piece of software. If everyone commits to using it, it allows auditors to be much more efficient and effective on keeping track of PBC lists, and allow clients to see what is open. This holds everyone accountable, and allows for much less back and forth between auditors and their clients. I also appreciate the fact that it is customizable, and the PBC lists can be customized according to the wants and desires on both sides of the table. Honestly, it would be hard to go back to excel based PBC lists.

Inconvénients :

The only real problem with Suralink is the hesitation with certain clients on using it. It can be intimidating to them, and so, clients will not always take to it's use. There are also some small areas that I would like to be able to further customize, but it's nothing I can't deal with.

Great, but could be amazing

Commentaires : I love it. It could be slightly better, but so can everything else. Every customer that I work with love that it is so much easier than what some of their other audit companies have used.

Avantages :

The ability to organize and manage my audit engagements with each of my customers. It is fairly simple for every company that I have worked with to see what tasks were needed to be completed and what tasks were complete. The tracking feature at the top, the one that displays the percentages, is really useful for keeping the customer focused on completing tasks.

Inconvénients :

The management side of things. It is difficult to change requirement number, reorganize requirements, format wording in requirement descriptions, and filter requirements based on assigned users. Each of these features would help me customize each project and manage my customers. The filtering of requirements based on assigned users comment came directly from a customer. They had different users with client accounts in Suralink and the customers project manager wanted to filter requirements based on which employee he was talking to. I realize that this would be helpful to me as well.

Suralink Review

Commentaires : We are solving the problem of clients taking a long time to upload documents. Having Suralink notify clients that we are uploading documents or changing requests reminds them that we are doing an engagement and they need to provide us with the information to complete it.

Avantages :

I like that you can roll forward engagements that have been completed in previous years. I also like that we can keep all our documents in one place, and it tells us when clients have downloaded or uploaded documents to the site. It makes it easier to keep track of our engagements.

Inconvénients :

it is difficult to navigate and hard to find resources to know how to solve something. For instance, we need to be invited to an engagement before we can see any or upload any documents that we need for an audit. I would like to be able to search for client and request to be part of the engagement team. It is hard to know if the client has a suralink set up or not because this is not an option.

Excellent for privacy for your clients

Commentaires : I would recommend using Suralink as a private document upload site for any company that wants to give their clients more sense of security.

Avantages :

I appreciate that this software gives your clients peace of mind and a very private way to provide information to your firm and give them reassurance that their employees information won't be leaked on the web. It also is a great way to customize your requests to your client to get exactly the documents that you need from them.

Inconvénients :

A few times the system has a glitch where I was not able to see my side of the Suralink and thus not able to download the documents that the client had uploaded.

Suralink

Avantages :

Ease of use. Security. organization. tailored for accounting/audit

Inconvénients :

Wish there was an app. The default when you click on a project should be the most detailed level as default. Instead, you have to toggle on each list to get to the detail of the request. Wish there was at least a user option setting to have your defauls for every list be the most detailed

Suralink Review

Commentaires : The Risk Assurance and Advisory Services department of Armanino utilize Suralink for gathering of overall support to aid the documentation process for Audits. Suralink does a decent job with support storage and display of the support. Overall, it's a good application.

Avantages :

The design is simple and the software loads very easily with no lag at all. The square boxes for request lists are a very helpful indicator of whether the support has been provided or is outstanding/returned. The contact list for clients are stored with the emails right below the names of the clients for ease of communication.

Inconvénients :

There isn't anything bad with the application but many improvements can be made. It can be integrated with documentation to include test procedures along with the control description. It can also have a testing tab for controls that require sample testing and a results/summary tab. This would help with the documentation speed by alot, improve the overall auditing process and relationship with the client as well.

Suralink is Almost Perfect

Commentaires : I really helps customers understand what is required of them durring an assessment.

Avantages :

Task assignments, project organization, file transfer, evidence repository

Inconvénients :

Not an option for N/A (Not Applicable) for a Request State. You can select "fulfilled", "Returned", and "Accepted" but it would be very helpful to be able to see the N/A items. We created a template for our customers but not all items are applicable to all customers. I can only select "remember this computer for 30 days" on one system at a time for multi-factor authentication. I use my laptop on site and my desktop at home and I would like to be able to have both systems remembered.

Great Document Management Solution

Commentaires : Overall, this product has made my job much easier. My clients are happy with the product and I will happily continue to use it.

Avantages :

The product is very user-friendly. We can usually create our client accounts and clients are able to navigate the site and upload documentation without specific instructions on how to use the interface.

Inconvénients :

It is difficult to add a new request and then change the order of the requests. Currently, I have to download a csv copy, re-order the requests, and then re-create the engagement using the csv spreadsheet as the template. It would be great if the web interface allowed us to change the order of requests.

By FAR one of my favorite accounting tools

Avantages :

What is NOT to love about Suralink? It makes it incredibly simple to have my clients upload documents that we need, and that the whole team can access the documents in one place, instead of CCing each other on group emails, or forwarding audit support. It also is very helpful in that it tracks who uploaded specific documents and when, as that has helped our team more than once prove that something a client was saying was incorrect, and we had actual evidence to support it. Thank you Suralink team!

Inconvénients :

Our firm had an issue with the way Suralink was rolling the documents from year to year, which caused hours of headache once I'd discovered it. We have thankfully since resolved the issue.

Great source for file sharing

Commentaires : Our firm received positive feedback from the staff and clients when we implemented the change to Suralink. It has been a good switch for us. The customer service is also very responsive and helpful.

Avantages :

I like that this is an easy platform to share files between the client and the firm. The requests can be rolled forward to the next period easily. I also like that you can set up controls over who has access to the client information.

Inconvénients :

Sometimes switching between windows isn't the most logical, but it is easy to figure out.

Effectively able to track our client request lists!

Commentaires : The added organizational aspect is very beneficial to us and our clients, as well as the ease of use. Our clients have said over and over how easy it was to use. We have found that we are receiving the requested files sooner than we were previously.

Avantages :

The organizational aspect is very helpful - we are able to organize our requests and better track what has been received and what requests are still outstanding.

Inconvénients :

We have run into instances when a client can't sign up because they are part of another "firm". My understanding is that this is being worked on, but we have had to use a workaround several times over the last few months as a result.

Suralink is great

Commentaires : Suralink is great. It keeps all of our document in one place that allows multiple levels of our audit team to access. The request feature is easy to implement (both the excel upload and doing it from scratch) and can be easily changed (requests made during the audit). This is much better than other mediums that I have used, including GoogleDocs, ShareFile, and Dropbox.

Avantages :

This is a software that our client likes, and its user-friendly interface makes it easy for us to convince them to use it.

Inconvénients :

The accepting/rejecting feature. "Rejecting" seems harsh but this is such a little thing.

Suralink Review

Avantages :

User friendly, very transparent, protection via encryption (safer than email)

Inconvénients :

Reject button is a bit aggressive for clients, consider alternative for when documents uploaded are not correct and have to be returned, not being able to open multiple suralink files at once (to compare request listings.. only way I currently know to deal with this is exporting a suralink file to PDF/excel then comparing with another request listing.

Outstanding

Commentaires : The Suralink team has developed an incredible tool that works flawlessly. This tool is a game changer. If you are using excel sheets and shared folders you are living in the stone age.

Avantages :

Ease of use and user experience is awesome. Reliability is very high.

Inconvénients :

Nothing to note. The software has performed well for us over the past 5+ years and the team has continually improved features.