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Big Four member EY recently marked the one-year anniversary of a $1 billion program meant to streamline its internal operations.

In particular, the initiative focuses on improving the consulting giant’s assurance workflows. Assurance is accounting parlance for making sure that financial audits like the ones EY carries out on clients’ behalf are accurate.

EY marked the one-year milestone by revealing that it carries out about 175,000 audits a year for clients. It also disclosed that its professionals analyze 775 billion lines’ worth of accounting journal entries as part of those audits, which is quite a bit of data.

More notably, EY offered a glimpse into exactly what it is that it’s doing to improve its assurance processes. The effort seems to revolve in part around a technology partnership with Microsoft that involves the tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

“The EY and Microsoft alliance is central to this program as the EY organization delivers on its commitment to continuously improve audit quality; drive sustainable long-term value; and facilitate greater confidence among EY stakeholders and the stakeholders of companies served,” remarked EY Global vice chair Marie-Laure Delarue. 

According to EY, its IT team has been working to streamline assurance workflows using the AI tools available in Azure. The firm said the AI technology is being applied to chores such as summarizing long financial documents and  helping EY employees find specific snippets of knowledge in the data haystack that is the firm’s internal data landscape.

The Big Four consultancy also revealed that it’s using a Microsoft application called Power BI to support its assurance work.

Power BI is at its core a data visualization tool. It’s not suitable for determining whether a financial audit is accurate, but what it can do is help EY executives track high-level performance metrics like how many audits were carried out in the past two years and how many employees took part.

EY said that it has rolled out more than “20 major assurance technology capabilities” in the year since it launched its $1 billion assurance modernization initiative. The term “capability” in this context probably means one of three things: a new internal software application, a big update to an existing application or a new integration between technology systems. 

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