Extractly — AI Financial Document Processing for Audit
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Extractly is an AI-powered financial document processing platform, now part of Caseware, that automates extraction and validation of financial data from PDFs, invoices, and bank statements inside an Excel add-in built for audit workflows.
Overview
Founded in 2021 in North Wollongong, Australia, by Alastair Raphael, Extractly built three audit-focused document processing products with just 2 employees. That lean structure attracted acquisition rather than independent scaling. Its focus on financial statement validation and PDF data extraction drove enterprise adoption before the company was two years old: BDO Australia deployed the platform for three years and expanded it beyond audit teams into other firm divisions, according to Accountex reporting on the acquisition.
On January 21, 2025, Caseware acquired Extractly as its ninth acquisition since Hg Capital took majority ownership in 2020, folding Extractly+, Validate, and Statemently into a platform serving 500,000+ users across 130 countries. Raphael and the entire Australia-based team joined Caseware. The deal closed weeks after David Marquis joined as Caseware's new CEO, arriving from a five-year tenure at Intuit.
By March 2026, roughly one year post-acquisition, Caseware Extractly was named to Accounting Today's 2026 Top New Products list and Caseware won FinTech Breakthrough's Overall Accounting Platform of the Year award, evaluated from over 4,500 global nominations. The timing of that recognition, approximately 12 months after closing, suggests the integration landed without major disruption to the product or its customer base.
The acquisition fits a visible pattern in the intelligent document processing (IDP) market: narrow-niche vendors built for vertical workflows becoming targets as larger audit platforms race to embed document intelligence natively. For accounting firms currently using Extractly+ or Validate as standalone products, the key open question remains whether Caseware maintains them as accessible standalone offerings or gates them behind broader platform contracts. No integration timeline or pricing changes have been disclosed.
How Extractly processes documents
Post-acquisition, Extractly operates as an AI-powered Excel add-in that automatically extracts and structures data from source documents, including invoices, PDFs, and bank statements, while maintaining dynamic links to the underlying evidence. Each extracted data point stays connected to its source document, which strengthens audit trails and reduces review time without requiring auditors to leave their existing Excel workflows.
The engine validates calculations, compares extracted values against workpapers, and identifies inconsistencies across large document volumes. This combination of extraction plus validation is what separates Extractly from basic OCR tools: the platform does not just read documents, it checks the numbers against each other and flags what does not reconcile.
Before integration into Caseware, Extractly operated three distinct products. Validate was a cloud-based AI tool automating financial statement review with algorithms for mathematical accuracy, internal consistency, prior-period consistency, and cross-version consistency, specialized for audit workflows rather than general IDP. Extractly+ handled automated PDF-to-Excel data extraction with document matching, collaborative team access, and click-to-source navigation. Statemently focused specifically on PDF bank statement data extraction, covering a document type that sits outside the scope of standard financial statement review.
Post-acquisition, these three products appear consolidated into the unified Excel-based interface within the broader Caseware platform. The consolidation simplifies the user experience and reduces maintenance overhead while preserving the core capabilities that drove BDO Australia's multi-year adoption.
Danielle Supkis Cheek, SVP AI, Analytics and Assurance at Caseware, stated in January 2025: "Extractly.ai's tech helps accounting and finance professionals increase efficiency and save valuable time by automating tedious tasks."
One constraint remains: Validate is currently available in English-speaking markets only, with non-English localization deferred to an unspecified date. Firms operating in multilingual environments should factor this into their evaluation, even though the platform nominally supports English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German.
Use cases
Financial statement validation for audit firms
BDO Australia's three-year deployment before the acquisition is the clearest evidence of enterprise-scale utility. Damian Wright, National Leader, Audit and Assurance at BDO, stated the platform "revolutionized the way BDO approaches financial statement reviews," and adoption spread from the initial audit team into other firm divisions. That cross-departmental expansion matters: it signals the tool solves problems beyond the narrow audit review step, reaching into broader financial reporting workflows.
Validate's algorithms verify mathematical accuracy, check consistency between related statements, compare current-year figures against prior periods, and flag discrepancies across draft versions. These are specific audit workflow requirements that general-purpose IDP solutions typically do not address. The cross-version consistency check, in particular, addresses a pain point that emerges late in the audit cycle when multiple draft versions of a financial statement exist simultaneously.
PDF financial data extraction with Excel integration
Extractly+ extracts financial data from PDF statements, trial balances, and schedules into Excel with click-to-source navigation. The platform identifies tables and data structures, maps information to appropriate cells, and maintains relationships between linked documents while supporting collaborative workflows with role-based permissions. AutoSum verification adds automatic data checking on top of the extraction step.
Caseware reports that customers complete processes previously requiring several hours of manual work in minutes using Extractly. That claim is vendor-reported and carries no independent verification, but it aligns with the type of time reduction that structured PDF extraction typically delivers when replacing manual re-keying.
Bank statement processing
Statemently handles PDF bank statement data extraction specifically, covering a document type that sits outside the scope of standard financial statement review tools. Bank statements present distinct extraction challenges: variable formatting across institutions, multi-page transaction tables, and the need to reconcile totals against opening and closing balances. Addressing this as a dedicated capability, rather than a secondary feature, reflects Extractly's audit-first design philosophy.
Cross-version consistency checking
The Validate engine performs specialized cross-version consistency analysis, detecting changes between draft versions of financial statements and ensuring accuracy throughout the review process. This capability addresses a specific audit workflow requirement: when a financial statement goes through multiple review cycles, tracking what changed between versions and whether those changes introduced new inconsistencies is a manual, error-prone task. Automating it reduces both review time and the risk of a version-control error reaching the final report.
Technical specifications
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Deployment | Cloud-based SaaS, Excel add-in |
| Core products | Validate, Extractly+, Statemently (consolidated post-acquisition) |
| AI algorithms | Mathematical accuracy, internal consistency, prior-period consistency, cross-version comparison |
| Document types | Digital PDFs, scanned documents, handwritten notes |
| Language support | English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German |
| Validate availability | English-speaking markets only; non-English localization deferred |
| Excel integration | Click-to-source navigation, AutoSum verification, role-based permissions |
| Dynamic source linking | Each extracted data point linked to source document |
| Target users | Audit professionals, accounting firms, corporate finance teams |
| Pricing | Unchanged following acquisition; no new tiers disclosed |
| Integration roadmap | Not disclosed |
| Open source | No |
Market recognition
The firms that will lead the next decade are those embracing AI not as a future consideration, but as a present-day advantage. Caseware is embedding AI and intelligent automation at the core of the workflows professionals already rely on, so firms can manage complexity with confidence, scale without compromise and deliver the kind of insight their clients increasingly expect.
Ericka Podesta McCoy, Chief Marketing Officer at Caseware, March 2026
In February 2026, Accounting Today named Caseware Extractly one of the profession's top new products for 2026. The following month, FinTech Breakthrough selected Caseware as Overall Accounting Platform of the Year, evaluated from over 4,500 global nominations. Steve Johansson, Managing Director of FinTech Breakthrough, cited "seamless integration, AI-driven workflows, advanced productivity tools and firm-level customization" as the deciding factors.
Both awards are industry-selected rather than independently benchmarked, and FinTech Breakthrough does not disclose its evaluation methodology or weighting criteria. That said, recognition from both a practitioner publication (Accounting Today) and a fintech awards body within 12 months of acquisition does indicate the product landed with its target audience rather than stalling in integration.
A Wolters Kluwer survey cited by Accounting Times AU found 27% of accounting professionals already use AI tools, with 22% planning adoption within a year. That adoption curve is the market signal behind Caseware's acquisition strategy: firms are actively looking for AI tools that fit existing audit workflows, not general-purpose document processing platforms they need to configure from scratch.
Company information
Extractly was founded in 2021 in North Wollongong, Australia, by Alastair Raphael, who served as CEO through the acquisition and joined Caseware post-close along with the entire two-person Australia-based team. The company operated as a lean, two-employee startup for its entire independent life, building three distinct products before attracting acquisition interest.
Caseware, headquartered in Canada and majority-owned by Hg Capital since late 2020, completed the Extractly acquisition on January 21, 2025, as its ninth acquisition under that ownership structure. David Marquis joined as Caseware's CEO weeks before the deal closed, arriving from Intuit. The Extractly products now reach Caseware's installed base of 500,000+ users across 130 countries, a distribution footprint the two-person startup could not have reached independently.
Resources
- Caseware Acquisition Announcement
- Globe Newswire: Acquisition Press Release
- Globe Newswire: Dual Honours Announcement, March 2026
- Fintech Futures: Three Products Absorbed
- Finance Director Europe: Localization Status
- CPA Practice Advisor: Product Capabilities
- Accounting Times AU: Market Context
- PitchBook Company Profile