Trust reconciliation is one of those steps within employee benefit plan audits that never gets easier by doing it over and over again.
The plan’s trust report arrives as a PDF in whatever format the recordkeeper uses. Someone builds a trial balance out of it. They pull the 5500. They line the two up, usually in a workbook that a senior built two seasons ago and nobody has fully reverse-engineered since. Then they check it against the audited trial balance, which lives in a separate file elsewhere. When a number doesn’t tie out, someone has to chase it down.
Do the same step across every engagement and it becomes one of the most expensive recurring hours in the practice. Multiply it by a plan that uses more than one service provider, or one that switches recordkeepers mid-year, and the hours compound from a second workbook, a second format to learn, and a second chance for error.
Trust reconciliation doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s what changes when it runs inside Autire instead of a workbook, from the moment the trust report comes in to the moment the numbers reach review.
Import: How the Data Gets In
Trust Reconciliation in Autire starts at planning and document gathering, where the auditor uploads the plan’s annual documents and selects the recordkeeper and certifying entity on the Trust Statement row.
Trust reports aren’t standardized across the industry, which means a certified statement from one provider looks nothing like the next. To add to that complexity, a plan often has more than one document making up its trust reporting.
Autire’s EBP team researches how each provider accounts for transactions and formats its data, then builds that structure into the platform. The auditor isn’t spending time mapping fields or learning a new format on every engagement.
Trust Reconciliation: Every Balance in One View
The most important part of a reconciliation is being able to see the big picture. Once the data is in, Trust Reconciliation builds the trial balance and presents it next to the other balances the auditor needs to see. For firms with multiple service providers, Autire compiles everything into one Master Reconciliation view that brings them all together.
An auditor comparing the trust figures against the audited trial balance used to have to manually reference between separate screens. Now, the comparison that matters most sits one column over, on the same row, so the auditor can zero in on any issues quickly.
For firms with tens or hundreds of plans, Autire has refined its platform to handle everything from the simplest to the most complex audit circumstances:
- Trial balances built the same way, every time. A single or consolidating trial balance, one provider or four. A mid-year recordkeeper transition becomes a second column, not a second workbook.
- Prior-year balances come across in one click. When the current year’s trust report doesn’t include beginning balances, and the prior year was audited in Autire, the auditor can pull last year’s ending investment balances into the current year’s reconciliation instantly.
- Revenue sharing transactions standardized by provider, not by plan. Updated recordkeeper automations understand how providers report revenue sharing transactions, net or gross, and standardize the mapping into Trust Reconciliation.
Enhanced Trust Reconciliation gives auditors an efficient workflow with automation that helps them perform required procedures faster. The final audit documentation stays in the auditor’s control. What changes is how long it takes to get there: minutes instead of hours, with that time spent on judgment instead of the chase.
Output: What Happens to the Result
Because Trust Reconciliation runs in Autire’s end-to-end system, the reconciled numbers are available to flow to the appropriate audit steps. When every engagement’s reconciliation has the same structure, a manager reviewing a plan reads the numbers and knows the source. The reviewer’s question becomes “does this make sense” instead of “is the formula right?”
While Trust Reconciliation is only one piece of the EBP workflow where Autire improves efficiency and consistency, it’s a piece where Autire highlights the gap between a general EBP auditing tool — a checklist and a spreadsheet — and a platform built especially for EBP audits.
If you’re already using Autire: You can start using the enhanced Reconciliation view on Autire.ai by selecting (or re-selecting) the recordkeeper and certifying entity for your trust statement, and the new enhanced feature set runs from there. Plans where those selections were already made stay on the previous version, so completed work isn’t disturbed.
