Every firm has checks that are unique to it. Standards you hold across every client, preferences specific to one, and engagement scopes you need to hold the line on. Most of the time, that knowledge lives in an individual accountant's head, and only gets applied if they remember to check for it, on every client at every close.
Your firm can now add its own checks, called custom reviews, to the review Meridian runs at the end of every close. Custom reviews make it so your standards no longer depend on who's reviewing and ensure they get applied consistently and accurately across your entire client base.
What are custom reviews?
Custom reviews let you encode what you always check (your firm's standards, your client's quirks, your pricing tiers) into the review Meridian already runs, so every close gets QA’d the way a human reviewer would do it, except with infinite patience.
Every close in Meridian already ends with a review, a separate agent from the one that completes the close. The review agent confirms the reconciliations, checks each transaction against how it's been treated in prior months, and reads the books against everything it knows about the client. A custom review is a step you add on top of that based on what’s most important to your firm.
You write review instructions in plain language, the same way you'd direct a staff accountant to run an extra check. Meridian runs those custom checks after the standard review every month and presents the results alongside everything else it found.
Examples of custom reviews
Here are the kinds of checks firms like yours are running:
- Firm-level standards. The checks you apply to every client. This could be flags for transactions over $10,000, running vertical-specific checks, or anything that’s still uncategorized at the end of the close.
- Advisory signals. The checks that catch when a client becomes a fit for advisory services. This could be a fundraise, a cleared revenue threshold, or payroll crossing a certain level.
- Client-specific sensitivities. The checks for what an individual client cares about most. This could be confirming travel and entertainment is allocated correctly by department, meals coded to sales rather than overhead, or an extra pass on anything a client has told you they want to watch out for.
Using custom reviews to enforce service tiers
One firm uses custom review to enforce its pricing tiers. The owner-led CPA firm prices its engagements on a five-tier structure built around attributes of each client's books like the number of bank accounts, credit cards, and transactions.
Before Meridian, the firm had no systematic way to spot when a client had outgrown their tier. Now the check runs as part of every monthly close and flags any client whose books exceed their current tier. The firm can move those clients to the right tier and get paid for the work it was already doing, helping the firm earn more for the same work.
Custom reviews within the larger review surface
Custom reviews are part of the existing review surface. The review is a built-in stage of the checklist that runs every close, and the checks it performs come out of the box for every firm. Custom reviews are the additional step you add to those existing checks. Its results land alongside everything else on the review page: the built-in review's findings, business insights about what's happening in the client's business, a summary of what the agent did during the close, and the financials themselves, with Meridian AI right there for follow-up questions.
And because the context lives where the work happens, the review feeds the next close. When your review turns up a refinement, whether that's to the books, the client's context, the checklist, or the custom review steps themselves, you feed it back into Meridian and next month's close runs tighter because of it.
Custom reviews are available in Meridian now. Schedule a working session to see what your firm's checks look like running on every close.
