§ Free ebook

The Signed Review

Consistent, manager-grade review changes the economics of an accountancy firm.

Cash is released. Profit rises. Service improves. Risk falls.

This guide shows how a firm does it with AI, while holding the one control that matters most: no partner is ever asked to sign a figure that cannot be traced back to its source.

A practical 90-day roadmap, drawn from a live UK accountancy practice. Free to read.

Umar Memon · Managing Partner · Manchester practice, est. 1948

Human-signed. AI-supported. Evidence-rich.

For a decade the profession poured its energy into automating preparation: bookkeeping, bank feeds, draft accounts. Review, the work of testing that output and standing behind it, was left almost where it was. That is the half where lock-up builds, where quality drifts from file to file, and where the partner becomes the bottleneck.

This guide is about closing that gap with AI, without giving up the control that makes a review a review. Its foundation is the Trace-to-Source Standard: before any figure reaches a signature, it must earn its way from a claim in the draft to evidence a partner can point to. That journey has five states.

The five states of a number

CLAIMED
The number is asserted in the draft; nothing stands behind it yet.
CITED
The number points to a named source: a working paper, a schedule, a ledger.
PINNED
The citation resolves to an exact location: file, sheet and cell.
PROVEN
The evidence at that location actually supports the number, tested rather than assumed.
SIGNED
A named, qualified partner has reviewed the trail and put their name to it.

What the book gives you

Run the checklist on a live FRS 102 set this afternoon.
The Trace-to-Source Standard, written down.
A 90-day roadmap to the same operating model.

“A finding you can’t trace to source isn’t a review point. It’s your name on the file, not the software’s.”

The Signed Review The Trace-to-Source Standard

About the author

Umar Memon is a chartered accountant with thirty-five years inside UK firms, from BDO Binder Hamlyn and Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) to Jack Ross Chartered Accountants in Manchester, where he is Managing Partner. Across those years he watched work in progress erode cashflow, review quality vary from file to file, and partners absorb the overflow. He built Infinite Accountant inside the Manchester practice to answer it, running it on live statutory files, and writes the weekly briefing The Partner Still Signs. His argument in one line: AI can surface the evidence; the partner still signs.

For broader writing on AI in accountancy, statutory accounts review and the future of professional judgement, read Umar Memon’s articles and essays.

Read Umar’s AI accountancy essays →