Dec 01, 2025 | Audit
Thomson Reuters and Ecosystem Partners Bring PPC Methodology into AI‑Powered Audit Workflows
As firms race to modernize, Thomson Reuters is working with leading audit innovators to keep trusted PPC methodology at the center of AI-enabled audit transformation, writes Dave Wyle
When I talk with audit leaders today, I hear the same things: tight capacity, rising expectations, evolving standards, and a flood of AI tools that are hard to evaluate. Firms want to modernize their audit firms, but not at the expense of quality, documentation, or compliance.
At Thomson Reuters, our starting point is, and will remain, PPC methodology. For decades, firms have relied on Thomson Reuters PPC methodology as the gold standard for audit quality, documentation, and compliance. Our vision for AI in auditing builds on that foundation. We’re not asking firms to change how they practice. We’re focused on making PPC the most AI‑automated audit methodology in the market—through our own products and through deep partnerships with innovators our customers already trust.
That’s the idea behind our recent partnerships with Trullion, Audit Sight, Crunchafi, Fieldguide, Validis, and Valid8 Financial. Together, we’re embedding PPC into AI‑driven tools across Guided Assurance. We’re supporting AI-powered automation with Audit Intelligence, so firms can automate more work while staying grounded in the trusted methodology they already rely on.
Trullion: Methodology‑aware automation for financial statement review
Financial statement review is one of the most judgment‑intensive parts of the audit—but many of the underlying procedures are repeatable. Our integration with Trullion brings AI‑native automation to financial statement review and testing, with full traceability back to PPC methodology and the relevant guidance at every step.
Artie Minson, CEO at Trullion, describes the shift: “This partnership signals a new era for audit automation and lays the foundation for trusted and truly agentic workflows. Our vertical AI solution is built for auditors by auditors, ensuring our outputs are within the framework of professional standards. This integration creates methodology-aware automation. Auditors can now focus their time on applying judgment to fully evidenced, agentic outputs, rather than searching for them, delivering audits with unmatched efficiency, accuracy, and quality.”
For us, “methodology‑aware” is key: automation is valuable only when it operates within the same professional framework firms already use to define, document, and support their work.
Audit Sight: Substantive analytics that reduce testing
Substantive testing is another area where firms feel the strain. Even when technology is available, many teams still default to large samples and manual procedures.
As T.C. Whittaker, Co‑Founder and CEO of Audit Sight, puts it: “Audit firms are seeking smarter ways to expand capacity and elevate quality without adding headcount. Bringing automated testing together with Thomson Reuters’ PPC methodology — and enabling it through Guided Assurance — is the ultimate unlock for auditors. It transforms the audit plan itself, making it intelligent and dynamic by tailoring procedures, eliminating unnecessary tests, and reducing sample sizes based on automated evidence and client-specific risk. This partnership represents a shared vision to redefine how assurance is delivered in the modern era.”
Crunchafi: Automating lease procedures inside PPC
Lease accounting has become a complex, time‑consuming area for many firms. Too often, teams spend hours on calculations and reconciliations instead of higher‑value work.
By integrating Crunchafi into Guided Assurance, we bring seamless lease accounting automation directly into PPC‑based workflows, eliminating manual lease calculations and providing audit-ready journal entries, amortization schedules and footnote disclosures while preserving firms’ established methodology.
Mike Cooke, CRO at Crunchafi, explains: “Audit teams want efficiency without sacrificing quality. By aligning Crunchafi’s automation with the PPC Methodology, we’re giving firms a clearer, more reliable way to handle lease accounting from the start of the engagement to the final deliverable.”
This is the pattern we’re aiming for: automation that plugs into how firms already work, rather than asking them to start from scratch.
Fieldguide: Empowering Firms with Flexible Paths to Automate PPC Methodology
Many firms also want a more connected environment where methodology, evidence, and automation all live together. Our goal is to meet firms where they are – and give them options.
That is why we’ve partnered with Fieldguide to embed Guided Assurance—which delivers PPC methodology—directly into Fieldguide’s professional‑grade agentic AI platform. This creates a unified experience where trusted PPC content and intelligent automation collaborate to execute engagements efficiently and consistently.
Whether firms choose to automate audits with Thomson Reuters or Fieldguide, they can be confident they’re using the most trusted and automated methodology in the profession. This flexibility reflects our commitment to innovation and the unique needs of our customers.
Jin Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Fieldguide says: “Firms are under pressure to do more with less. They need trusted methodology and AI agents that work the way they do. By embedding Thomson Reuters PPC methodology into our platform, we’re helping firms deliver higher quality work with more consistency and less effort. This partnership reflects a shared commitment to the future of the profession.”
Validis: Data as the foundation for AI‑driven auditing
AI is only as good as the data behind it. For many firms, getting clean, audit‑ready data from clients is one of the toughest operational challenges.
Through Audit Intelligence Analyze, our work with Validis focuses on solving that. Validis powers secure, on‑demand ingestion of client trial balance, general ledger, and subledger data directly into Audit Intelligence. From there, we use AI and machine learning to focus testing on high‑risk areas, segment populations by risk, and reduce the number of items to be tested, with anomaly detection automatically surfacing unusual items and generating the required documentation.
As Jeff Gramlich, Managing Director at Validis, explains: “We’re excited to collaborate with Thomson Reuters, a true market leader and innovator, to deliver audit-ready data through our cutting-edge ingestion capabilities. This partnership provides auditors with the data breadth and granularity crucial for effective AI-driven auditing. By integrating our technology into the Audit Intelligence suite, we’re empowering auditors to conduct data-driven audits with enhanced efficiency and risk analysis, ultimately transforming the process to benefit both auditors and their clients.”
Valid8 Financial: Turning evidence gathering into an automated workflow
Finally, there’s the everyday work of matching samples to evidence and documenting that work in a way that stands up to inspection and peer review. This is some of the most manual and time‑consuming work in an audit.
Audit Intelligence Test, developed with Valid8 Financial, automates the matching and documentation of samples to supporting evidence, dynamically tracing accounting transactions to banking activity to confirm occurrence. It brings technology traditionally used in advisory, forensic, and financial crime work into an integrated audit workflow.
Brett Suchor, CEO of Valid8 Financial, says: “We built our technology to solve real problems auditors face every day – reducing the manual, time-consuming work of matching samples to evidence. Through our collaboration with Thomson Reuters, we’re delivering a faster, more reliable testing experience to audit professionals across the industry.”
The future of Audit
In the next 3-5 years, we’re going to see big changes to the audit profession. Audit is moving decisively toward an automated, data-driven future. Using the right tools to increase efficiency and quality so teams can focus on higher risk areas and deliver better outcomes for clients is paramount.
In today’s environment, firms are being asked to do more with less, navigating tighter deadlines, increasing complexity, and growing client expectations. At Thomson Reuters, we are bringing auditors advanced audit technologies, with our newest audit solutions increasing efficiency and accuracy.
We’ll keep investing in our own AI capabilities and in this partner ecosystem so firms can modernize at their own pace, on their own terms—without walking away from the methodology that has served them well for decades.
