Client Spotlight
Association of International Certified Professional Accountants
How PerfectIt helped AICPA lower costs and reduce editing time by 75%
Company overview
The Association is the world’s largest and most influential body of professional accountants. It represents more than 650,000 members and students in public and management accounting in 179 countries.
The work of the Association includes the publication of standards used by accounting and auditing professionals, as well as continuing professional education (CPE) products that help members improve their skills. With members spread around the world, the Association offers over 350 self-study courses covering topics in a broad range of areas that must each take account of local differences and standards. The result is that document production is complex, with a team of editors working to deliver publications and training materials.
Challenge
Prepare course materials and publications for thousands of members around the world while ensuring consistency with the organizational style manual and local style preferences.
Solution
Customize PerfectIt style sheets so that standards can be applied consistently with a 75% saving in time spent editing.
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With tight deadlines at every workflow task, a second set of eyes is not always available. In one instance, PerfectIt found a reference to ‘death nail’ and asked, ‘Do you mean ‘death knell’?’ FANTASTIC CATCH!
Association of International Certified Professional Accountants
Managing Editor, Editorial Services
Customization and global reach
The Editorial Services department used the free video tutorials to customize PerfectIt to check for Association house style.
The custom styles support the organization’s global strategy with different base styles for US and UK spelling preferences, and also focuses on consistency regarding accounting- and finance-specific language.
It took just one editor to customize the styles, but the entire team can apply the appropriate style to every document in the editorial queue.
Results
Faster editing for an improved bottom line. The financial return from using PerfectIt at the Association comes from two key outcomes:
Reduced time spent editing.
Lower costs for outsourced editorial work.
Using PerfectIt, the Association found that an editor could complete an editorial review of:
A CPE chapter that needed a full edit in 1.6 hours (down from 4.5 hours).
A course with low-level changes in one hour (down from four hours).
A senior editor at the organization estimated that time spent on courses with medium-level changes was cut in half. The result is that editors have more time and more bandwidth to spend on editing for clarity. It also led to lower costs due to the reduced need to outsource work (saving both fees and management time involved).
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The customization tutorials were easy. Even with four different styles to cover our global strategy, I completed 90% of the first style in a day. The rest didn’t take much longer.
Association of International Certified Professional Accountants
Managing Editor, Editorial Services
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