Cheng & Co Group Leverages Nodejam to Eliminate the Assembly Line Between Tax Computations and Partner Reviews

The challenge

Cheng & Co Group is a mid-sized Malaysian accounting firm and member of the TGS Global network, with over 400 staff across multiple branches. At the branch level, a team of roughly 18 professionals manages three service lines: audit, tax, and advisory. The branch leadership oversees everything from staff utilization to client engagement fees to quarterly reporting for the Managing Partner.

The work was spread across a familiar set of tools: Word for management letters and client proposals, Excel for tax computations and budget trackers, PowerPoint for partner review presentations. Tax computations were manually assembled with capital allowance schedules. Client proposals were reformatted from scratch for each prospect. Branch performance reports required pulling data from multiple sources into separate files, then rebuilding the narrative in a slide deck for the quarterly review. Every engagement cycle involved the same assembly work.

Branch reporting without the assembly

The branch team built the entire reporting infrastructure within a single project. Revenue breakdowns across audit, tax, and advisory service lines. Staff utilization trackers for all 18 team members, with targets segmented by seniority level. An annual branch budget forecasting 15% growth from RM 2.4 million to RM 2.76 million, with monthly phasing and conditional formatting. Engagement fee proposals with market rate comparisons. All formula-driven, all cross-referenced, all in one place. The forecasts referenced the same utilization data that informed staffing decisions, with no copy-paste step in between.

Client work, from computation to letter

The compliance and client-facing work spanned the full engagement lifecycle within a single project. Corporate tax computations with Schedule 3 capital allowances and SME rate thresholds were built as spreadsheets, formula-driven with proper Malaysian tax framework references. Post-audit management letters documenting internal control findings under ISA 265 were created as text documents alongside. LHDN tax audit advisory letters referencing the Income Tax Act 1967. Client proposals for manufacturing SME prospects with fee structures and scope breakdowns. Each deliverable cross-referenced the same underlying data. A tax computation informed the advisory letter that accompanied it, and both fed into the client proposal. With everything in one project, discrepancies between documents were caught immediately rather than surfacing during client review.

Partner presentations from project data

The quarterly branch review for the Managing Partner had always been the most assembly-intensive task. Nine slides covering KPI dashboards, audit division updates, revenue by service line, staff utilization charts, and growth targets. Previously, this meant extracting data from spreadsheets, rebuilding it in PowerPoint, and formatting it for presentation. With the branch data already in the project, the slides were generated directly from the same numbers being tracked in the performance spreadsheets, with no extraction, no reformatting, and no version confusion. Across the program, 10 distinct deliverable types were created across all three file formats within a single workspace.

The same approach extended to training materials. Junior associate tax training presentations covering Malaysian tax fundamentals were built alongside the real compliance documents they referenced. New staff could see the training slides and the actual computations in the same workspace, connecting theory to practice without switching between a training folder and a client folder.

What changed

All three file types were used side by side within a single project. Tax computations informed client proposals. Branch performance data powered partner presentations. Training materials sat next to the real compliance documents they taught from. No copy-pasting between applications, no reformatting, no version confusion across scattered files.

For a branch managing audit, tax, and advisory across dozens of clients, the reduction in assembly work compounded across every engagement cycle. Each quarterly review, each new client proposal, each compliance deliverable started from context that was already there. The workspace didn't change how the team made decisions. It removed the formatting and assembly work that sat between every decision and its execution.