Most accountants have a love-hate relationship with their workpapers. You love that they live in Excel, where you can see everything and bend it to how your firm works. You hate that getting the data in there is still a manual grind.

You export the general ledger from Xero. You copy and paste it into Excel. You pull the ledger reports, the account transactions, the aged payables, and paste those too. Then you log into the ATO portal, copy the tax data, and paste again. And if something changes partway through a set of accounts, you start over. Export again. Paste again. Check again.

That pattern is the problem. And for a long time, the only way out felt like giving up the thing you actually like about Excel.

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The false choice: flexibility or automation

When PKF Newcastle and Sydney went looking for a better workpaper setup a few years ago, partner Stacie Shaw ran into the same wall a lot of firms hit.

The Excel-based options were familiar, but they did not have the integrations or automation to pull live data. The cloud platforms had the automation, but they cost the firm the flexibility Excel gives you. Some even needed the team to build Excel templates off to the side, then upload and attach them. Clunky. On top of that was the question every firm asks: how long will it take to train the team on a brand new platform?

"Excel, everyone knows it, loves it," Stacie said. "We're accountants after all."

So PKF made a call. Instead of moving off Excel, they doubled down on it, and brought in the integration and automation through RadiusCore.

What changes when the data comes to you

RadiusCore is an Excel add-in that connects directly to Xero and Xero Practice Manager. The workpapers live in Excel files on your own storage, so you own the data and control who sees it. What changes is how the data gets in.

You connect a client once, then pull live financial reports straight into Excel. Post a journal in Xero or edit a transaction, and one click refreshes every report in the workbook. No re-export. No re-paste.

The ATO data works the same way. You download a single file through Atosa, import it, and it seeds your workpapers with the tax data and full transaction history you need. Once you know what you are doing, seeding a workpaper takes under five minutes.

Enter it once, use it everywhere

The part that saves the most time is not any single integration. It is what happens after the data lands.

Stacie's team has a low tolerance for repeated effort, because repeated effort is where typos and transposition errors creep in. So they built their workpapers around a simple rule: you only touch a piece of information once.

The ATO data that comes in through the GST reconciliation flows straight into the other year-end workpapers. The pay-as-you-go installments feed the tax rec. The wages figures feed the super and payroll tax reasonableness checks. Dividends received flow into the franking account and the tax rec on their own.

Provision for tax is the clearest example. If the general ledger balances, the workpaper is fully automated. Your team enters one account code, and the opening balance, installments, and tax payable all populate. There is nothing left to key in.

Guiding the work, not just showing the numbers

A lot of workpaper tools will tell you the ledger balance and the supporting balance. If they do not match, you are on your own.

Every firm knows what happens next. A trainee spends five hours chasing a $100 difference on a GST rec, not because it matters, but because nothing told them it did not.

RadiusCore builds the guidance in. When there is a variance, the workpaper prompts the right checks. Has the client allocated ATO payments to the correct accounts? Are there general journals upsetting it? Has the client moved from cash to accruals? Was a BAS amended? Because it is still Excel, the team can drop notes, insert rows, or do a side calc wherever they need to.

Built for how a firm actually reviews work

The index page gives reviewers a traffic light view. Any red cross on a GL link is a flag, and the aim is green ticks everywhere before a job goes up for review. You can also see the same status per account, so you know exactly which workpaper supports each line on the chart of accounts.

Sign-off is built in too, with Xero-verified digital signatures across three tiers: staff, manager, and partner. And because it is a two-way sync, your team can draft a journal in Excel and push it to Xero, or hold it until a manager has reviewed the job. Useful when a client is funny about anyone touching their live file.

If a client is not on Xero, you can still import a trial balance and use the rest of the functionality. You are not locked out.

A look at what's coming

The next step is AI analysis, and the approach is built around data privacy. The short version is your data, your tenancy, your AI. The analysis runs on your firm's own Azure AI instance, inside your Microsoft 365 environment, so the data never leaves your control.

The idea is to run over an account like legal fees or repairs and maintenance, flag anything that does not belong, and draft a proposed journal you can post back to Xero. Analysis you can act on, not a summary.

We are showing the test build on 8 July. If that sounds useful, it is worth a look.

Try it on your next set of accounts

If you are still building workpapers from Xero exports, the fastest way to feel the difference is to run one job through RadiusCore.

Start a free 30-day trial of the Excel Add-in at radiuscore.co.nz/download. No credit card required.

Want to see it in action first? Watch the webinar replay of the full live build with Andrew and Stacie, or book a demo and we'll walk you through your own setup.

Already registered for the webinar? You don't need to register again. Just enter the same email you used to register and you'll go straight to the replay.