Valid8 forensic accounting software overview

Speed, cost efficiency, accuracy down to the penny, and the ability to derive immediate actionable insights from data is what every client seeks from their CPAs. However, current accounting standards often fall short.

Matt Sutorius: If I'm looking at a huge amount of revenue with thousands and thousands of transactions, I might look at 20 of them or 40 of them. So as you might guess, it's not the best way to go about testing a large balance, but it's basically what we've had in the past.

Phillip Guess: The way in which old forensic accounting was done in these financial fraud cases is so antiquated.

Eric Orse: Accountants go in and physically do the bank reconciliations, which is basically take the paper copy of the bank statement and take the books and do a bank reconciliation.

Phillip Guess: You basically have to spend six months to a year, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, and get very limited information.

For audits, manual data prep and statistical sampling comes with time and risk.

Matt Sutorius: 15 years ago when I started, that was really all we could do. Now that we have access to just large quantities of data in a way that we couldn't get before, it does make me nervous that we're not looking at it in new and or useful ways.

Tod McDonald: That's been basically the state of the art since the 1930s, and by selecting the wrong sample, you can identify a wrong conclusion.

Enter Valid8, a 21st century solution offering game-changing results.

Todd Tracy: I had never seen anything like this that could take a set of basically non-existent financial books and create for me, and for my client, and for the court readable, understandable, traceable, trackable information.

Eric Orse: Valid8 allowed us to, I think within a week to 10 days, pull together an analysis of all the bank statements for the prior 10 years.

Matt Sutorius: The ability to look at 100% of a population instantly and not have the inherent flaw associated with a person going through that level of transactional detail, it will change how we audit.

Built by CPAs for CPAs, Valid8 has a simple vision: to eliminate sample risk and manual data prep from the accounting profession. Co-founder Tod McDonald identified the need for Valid8 while immersed in what has become the largest Ponzi scheme in Pacific Northwest history.

Tod McDonald: So the Meridian Funds was a Chapter 11 case that ultimately unveiled itself. The second week of the case when I was sitting one-on-one with Darren Berg, the promoter of the funds, and he outright admitted that half the assets on a $200 million balance sheet didn't exist. We were dealing with the fraud case. We knew that DOJ, FBI would immediately be involved in. We knew that there was going to be a substantial forensic case ahead of us to figure out what had happened for us to formulate a strategy to recover as much funds back for about 750 investors who were out several hundred million dollars.

Phillip Guess: It was very difficult to trace. There were so many disparate types of accounts and we didn't have any financial books. What you have are 50 boxes of documents. That's 150,000 pages that you need to review or somebody needs to review to figure out what the heck went on.

Tod McDonald: In terms of being able to convert that into a database that you can analyze, we had a very big road ahead of us.

Phillip Guess: Tod and I sat down and said, "There's just got to be a better way. Isn't there software? Isn't there something that can do this? This is too expensive, it's too cumbersome, and it's, frankly, it's just too difficult."

Tod McDonald: I surveyed the landscape and really came up empty.

Chris McCall: The a-ha moment was really recognizing that, hey, if you're collecting evidence and this is the highest bar of scrutiny that you're using, you can apply it anywhere in professional accounting and it works.

Tod McDonald: And that's really where the idea behind Valid8 came from.

Valid8's evidence-first approach automates data extraction and integration from multiple third-party sources, including banking activity from over 20,000 financial institutions to accelerate evidence collection, automate verification procedures, and achieve superior quality by dramatically reducing sample risk.

Isaac Prieto: It's a matter of just pushing a PDF through Valid8 and with low fidelity statements or deposits or check images that we might receive and pushing that through this OCR that Valid8 provides is really helpful. It has a really great percentage of accuracy, I'd say, on pulling that data through.

Whether it's forensic, audit, tax, or advisory, Valid8 provides a bombproof data sandbox in 80% less time with best-in-breed data visualization.

Todd Tracy: One small visual led the client to an immediate change of process, which then ended up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars immediately.

Isaac Prieto: So Valid8 really hones in on the data in a way that we can actually tell that story.

Tod McDonald: By giving our clients better tools from which to make informed decisions, it really frees up the partners and staff of an auditing firm to really understand what the client is experiencing as a company and should really offer a tremendous amount of depth to that relationship and the ability to cross-sell additional services into it.

Evidence-based accounting for everyone equals better transparency, better trust, and better business. Transform your firm with Valid8 today.

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