Closing the collaboration gap: How a smarter workpaper process boosts engagement efficiency

Guest editorial by Ryan Smith

Across the GGI network, firms are investing in automation, analytics, and AI to stay competitive. However, one of the biggest sources of inefficiency is often overlooked: client collaboration.

Engagement teams aren’t losing time due to complexity – they’re losing time to missing documents, back-and-forth emails, and fragmented systems that make collaboration harder than it needs to be. It’s a bottleneck you can’t ignore: delays, lower realisation rates, budget overruns, and strained client relationships.

At many firms, workpapers live in Excel, client requests come through email, and notes are hidden in chat threads. This disconnection causes delays, miscommunication, and preventable errors, especially when clients don’t fulfill requests correctly the first time, which happens in over 50% of cases.

Even as firms try to modernise, 70% still report fragmented tech stacks. The result? Teams end up patching problems with spreadsheets and emails instead of solving them at the source.

Suralink’s Workpaper Suite is built to fix that. It combines client collaboration and workpaper management into a single, connected workflow, without asking teams to change how they work.

Built inside Excel, Workpaper Suite integrates directly with Suralink’s Request List Management platform. Engagement teams can link client-provided documents to workpapers, track status updates in real time, and keep comments tied to the work itself. This means:

Fewer missed documents and duplicate requests;
No more downloading or re-uploading support files;
Real-time updates and version control; and
Centralised comments and cleaner reviews.

This unified process reduces manual work, eliminates guesswork, and helps firms deliver more accurate work faster while improving the client experience.

For GGI members, this means more scalable engagements, stronger client trust, and greater profitability without disrupting the way your teams already operate.

When client collaboration is built into your workflow, your team spends less time following up, and more time moving forward.

Ryan Smith is the Vice President of Customer Success at Suralink. Before joining Suralink, Ryan worked at InMoment, a leading provider of customer experience (CX) software where he managed programs for some of the world’s largest companies, including Nike, Hertz, and Tiffany & Co. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in business administration, management, and operations from Utah Valley University.