About Johnston Carmichael

An independent accountancy and advisory firm with a team of almost 1,000 sharp minds based throughout the UK, Johnston Carmichael supports ambitious businesses across a diverse range of sectors.

Overview

Using Trullion during a pre-engagement walkthrough surfaced potential discrepancies in the prospect’s prior financial statements before a letter was signed — turning a prospect into a client, and creating top-line growth.

Auditable AI that earns trust

The audit practice adopted Trullion around a shared principle: AI output should be traceable, logic should be inspectable, and every conclusion can be tied back to source. Judgement, scepticism, and the opinions stay with the auditors.

This is audit-grade AI — the kind Trullion enables for firms. The team keeps the familiar audit checklist of steps; Trullion integrates throughout the audit process to execute substantive testing, financial statement reviews, and other procedures more efficiently.

Value realised during pre-engagement diligence

Before an engagement letter was signed, Johnston Carmichael was already using Trullion to show a prospect what a premium audit looks like. In preengagement diligence, Audit Partner Matt Kaye and his team ran the prospect’s prior-year financials through Trullion Financial Statement Validation workflow — casting the primary statements, agreeing disclosures back to the face, and comparing against the prior period.

Within minutes, the platform surfaced a handful of points worth a closer look. The conversation that followed wasn’t a pitch; it was a demonstration of how the firm uses AI to deliver a premium audit. The prospect became a Johnston Carmichael client, and Trullion was a driving factor in winning the work — not because of its speed, but because the prospect could see how their future auditors were already using AI to surface real insight leading to sharper conversations between auditor and CFO, rather than talking vaguely about the future potential of AI as so many other firms in the market currently do.

Scaling auditable AI across the practice

Johnston Carmichael rolled out Financial Statement Validation across the practice and is now scaling substantive transaction testing — already realising use cases where substantial time can be shifted from mechanical vouching to deeper exception analysis and closer, more proactive client feedback loops.

Conclusion