SpidNums vs CaseWare Cloud: how the two fit together

What CaseWare Cloud does well

This section comes first deliberately. CaseWare Cloud is a serious product with real customers, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

• CaseWare's working-papers products are the standard in Canadian assurance work, with a Canadian head office and deep local presence.
• Cloud collaboration on engagement files, with review notes and sign-off built for audit and review engagements.
• An enormous installed base means staff arrive already knowing it.
• Purpose-built for engagement-level quality control, which general practice-management tools do not attempt.

Where the fit differs

These are differences in model rather than claims about missing features. Where a capability is not listed for CaseWare Cloud, that means we did not verify it — not that it is absent.

• Layer: CaseWare works inside the engagement file. SpidNums works above it — which clients exist, what the firm owes them, when it is due and who owns it.
• These are complementary rather than competing. Most firms that use CaseWare still track deadlines somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a spreadsheet.
• SpidNums adds client-facing branding and engagement letters with e-signature, which the working-papers layer does not cover.
• SpidNums publishes flat per-firm pricing.

Pricing

CaseWare Cloud does not publish pricing we could verify, so this page does not state a number for it — ask the vendor for a current quote. SpidNums is a flat USD $1,200 per firm per year with every feature included, including white-label branding.

What SpidNums is, plainly

SpidNums is practice management for Canadian accounting firms: the client list, the services each client buys, the deadlines those services generate, the person who owns each one, and the engagement letter that defined the scope. It is not a general ledger, it does not prepare or transmit returns, and it does not calculate payroll — those stay in the tools your firm already files with.

The list below is the complete set of claims this site makes about the product. If a capability is not on it, we do not claim it.

• Multi-tenant white-label branding per firm — name, logo, colours, emails and letterhead
• Colour-coded SLA deadline dashboard ranked by proximity
• Aggregated reminders across tasks, service cadences and fiscal year-ends
• E-signed engagement letters with a public, no-login client portal
• Per-tenant Google Workspace integration
• Client portal
• Staff roles with confidential-client gating
• Canadian-hosted data (Supabase ca-central-1)
• Flat USD $1,200 per firm per year, all inclusive
• CSV/XLSX client import and export

Questions worth asking both vendors

Comparison grids converge because feature names converge. These six questions separate products that look identical on paper, and they are worth asking of CaseWare Cloud and of SpidNums alike.

• How is a deadline generated — from a rule tied to the client's fiscal year-end and reporting period, or from a recurring task somebody configured by hand?
• When a client's filing cadence changes, is that one field or a rewrite of every future date?
• Whose brand does the client see on emails, on the portal and on a signed engagement letter — and on which plan does that become true?
• Where is client data hosted, and is tenant isolation enforced in the database or only in the application? Get the answer in writing.
• What is the total annual cost at three seats and at ten? Ask for the total, not the per-user figure.
• What comes across on migration, and what does not? Clients usually move; documents, notes and completed work usually do not.

Who should choose CaseWare Cloud

Every firm doing assurance work needs a working-papers solution, and in Canada that is very often CaseWare. This is not a replace-one-with-the-other decision — if you are choosing between them, you are answering the wrong question.

If that describes your firm, take the other product seriously. If it does not, the practice management overview covers what SpidNums does in full.

Switching

There is nothing to switch. Firms typically keep CaseWare for engagement execution and add SpidNums for firm-wide deadline and client management. Client lists import by CSV or XLSX.

SpidNums imports and exports clients as CSV or XLSX. There is no direct migration connector, so historical documents, notes and completed work do not come across automatically — plan the cutover around a period boundary rather than mid-season.