From Early Adopter to Firm-Wide Champion: A Q&A with Tee Duncan, Partner, on 10 Years of Calcbench at Grant Thornton

"When people see the [Calcbench] platform in action, natural curiosity kicks in, and they want to try it for themselves."

We are delighted to share our recent interview with Tee Duncan, Partner, Grant Thornton, about how he and his team use Calcbench day-to-day. Duncan oversees audit quality and complex audit matters across several offices. His career began at Arthur Andersen, and has spanned quality management, audit standards, tools & training, and innovation across U.S. and international geographies. A longtime Calcbench user, Duncan was among the first at Grant Thornton to adopt the platform and has played a pivotal role in its adoption across the firm.

How did you first discover Calcbench? Around 10 years ago, I was introduced to Calcbench through our innovation team. At the time, there weren’t many users who had adopted Calcbench. I started experimenting with the platform and found two main use cases for it: (1) quickly getting up to speed on an engagement, using Calcbench’s Company Detail feature; and (2) finding examples of how companies describe new accounting standards or a specific footnote using the Interactive Disclosures feature.

How did adoption spread across the firm? Word of mouth has played a big role. I take the opportunity to show people what I’ve pulled from Calcbench. When people see the platform in action, natural curiosity kicks in, and they want to try it for themselves. Once they see how it makes them more efficient or effective, they’re motivated to use it. In the early days of the relationship, Calcbench held demos across our offices. Our firm’s learning group has done a great job of incorporating Calcbench into training for staff and managers alike.

What are some of the Calcbench features you rely on most in your day-to-day work? I mentioned Calcbench’s Company-in-Detail and Interactive Disclosures pages first because they both cover a wide range of use cases. To prepare for conversations with engagement teams, I use Company-in-Detail to refresh my understanding of what happened last quarter and how a client is trending year-over-year. Calcbench’s Interactive Disclosures gives me the ability to perform detailed searches in public filings, including disclosures for new accounting standards or industry-specific disclosures, SEC comment letters on certain topics, or Critical Audit Matters (CAMs) in auditor opinions.

As another use case for private and public company engagements, I also use Calcbench’s analytics tools to highlight how a client stacks up vis-à-vis competitors across a range of ratios: turnover, liquidity, inventory conversion, and other key metrics. Lastly, Calcbench’s Excel add-in is baked into everyone’s installed version of Excel. For quarterly analytics work, staff can prepopulate prior-period financial data into their spreadsheets. They just need to drop in the new period data. This saves them time. Some Grant teams also use it independently to pull in things like revenue comparisons across competitors or investment and interest rate information.

How is Calcbench data being incorporated into AI initiatives at the firm? While I can’t speak to the specifics, like every major firm, we’re making a meaningful investment in AI, and structured financial data is exactly the kind of input those tools need.