Audit and assurance teams
Audit work arrives as huge, inconsistent extracts: a general ledger dump too big for Excel, three periods in three different layouts, dates and currency formatted a different way in each. BigXL opens files of any size, cleans the formatting, and merges the periods by column name, without a single formula and without the file leaving your machine.
The work, not the workaround
Most audit data problems are not analysis problems. They are access problems. The extract is too big to open, the formats do not match between periods, and the only tool everyone has is a spreadsheet that gives up at 1,048,576 rows.
BigXL is built for exactly that gap. It opens the file, shows you the rows while it is still indexing, and lets you work through it with menus rather than formulas.
Opening what will not open
Point BigXL at a CSV, a TSV, a compressed .gz or .zst, a Parquet file, or
an Excel workbook, at any size. Files of 50 GB have been tested. You scroll,
sort, filter and pivot immediately, and none of that costs anything.
Cleaning what arrives messy
Client extracts are rarely tidy. The Pro cleaning tools handle the recurring offenders without a formula:
- Currency columns with symbols, thousands separators and brackets for negatives
- Dates in mixed formats, standardised to one pattern, with genuinely ambiguous dates refused rather than guessed
- Debit and credit in two columns, combined into one signed amount
- Text columns that need trimming, case fixing, or splitting on a separator
- Columns that should be numbers but contain stray text, grouped so you can decide what happens to each bad value
Merging periods that do not match
Combining quarters or years by copy and paste is where quiet errors come from. If the second file has its columns in a different order, every value lands in the wrong place and nothing warns you. BigXL matches on the header name and shows you what it will do before writing anything, including which columns appear in only some of the files.
Then, the part that matters to your firm
None of the above touches the network. File data never reaches a third-party server, and the tool works the same on an air-gapped machine. If you need to share a file outside the engagement team, the Enterprise tier can mask personal data before you do, and can write a short scan report that lists which columns hold personal data without including any values from the file.
On the record-keeping side, BigXL can export the session’s change log, and can generate a certificate listing the transformations applied with SHA-256 hashes of the source and exported files. Treat it as BigXL’s own record of what happened, useful as working-paper evidence. It is not an official certification and it does not make a determination about compliance.
Common questions
My client sent a ledger extract Excel will not open. What do I do?
Open it in BigXL instead. There is no row limit and no file size limit, and the file streams from disk rather than loading into memory, so a multi-gigabyte extract opens in seconds on an ordinary laptop. Opening, sorting, filtering and pivoting are free.
Can I merge several periods when the columns do not line up?
Yes. BigXL merges on column name rather than position, so a renamed or reordered header does not silently shift values into the wrong column. Columns present in only some of the files are kept, with blanks where a period did not have them.
Does anything get uploaded when I use Bix or the SQL console?
No. BigXL processes files locally. The query engine and language model both run on your own CPU, so client data stays on the machine even when you are asking questions in plain English.
Can I keep a record of what I did to a file?
Yes. File > Save record of changes writes a log of every operation in the session with timestamps. BigXL can also produce a certificate recording the transformations applied along with SHA-256 hashes of the source and the export. It is a record BigXL generates, not an external accreditation, and it does not certify regulatory compliance.