Audit and Assurance

How can our innovative approach to audit and assurance benefit you?

A few years ago we took a strategic decision to change the way we provide our audit and assurance services. The majority of our clients work with professional third party service providers (or intermediaries) and so we asked how the process could be improved. The answers were straight forward, yet consistent. As a result of these discussions, we enhanced our service offering.

We believe our service offering provides our clients with the assurance of ensuring the work is completed with the minimum of fuss for our clients (and their intermediaries) whilst maintaining the high quality required by the relevant standards.

A commercial approach that makes life easier

A number of our clients have come to appreciate that our approach is to "work with them, not against them."

This means that whilst we fully comply with the ethical standards and principles of independence and objectivity, we pro-actively work with our clients to find the most efficient solution to challenges they face, rather than spending a significant amount of valuable time on issues that are not critical or remaining aloof to their challenges.  This is particularly critical for our clients who have tight reporting deadlines for example those listed on the London Stock Exchange.

We follow international auditing, accounting and assurance standards and our audit team is well experienced including UK GAAP, US GAAP and IFRS.

Our experience has taught us that significant time is spent when junior staff are left to run the audit or assurance engagement.

A typical engagement will involve the junior doing the work, which is reviewed by the senior, then the manager, then potentially a senior manager and then only does a partner (in our case, as a corporate entity, our directors are the equivalent of partners) get involved.

This results in a number of inefficiencies:

• Questions being asked a number of times by different team members
• Team members changing due to other commitments such as exams
• Staff on the team do not fully understand the industry or your clients’ business
• Late director involvement resulting in last minute surprises

In order to provide our clients with efficiencies in the form of time saving, we have taken the following steps;

• Hands on approach and involvement by the director from day one. This is supported by our fully online audit methodology which ensures director involvement in all the key stages of the assignment. The most important issues are therefore clearly identified early on, and dealt with efficiently.
• Team staffed by predominantly fully qualified accountants (ICAS, ICAEW or ACCA), and the same staff will be involved from the first year and going forward as we generally have a low staff turnover. This ensures that in addition to having less time spent in understanding our client's industry, the staff are sufficiently experienced to handle complex client matters in the most efficient manner.

Fixed fee structure

We spend time understanding our clients’ structures, circumstances and industry prior to take on.  Throughout the process our experienced team ask relevant, insightful questions, and as our budgeting process is highly evolved, our fees are fixed.

Unless there is a significant change in the scope, or delays in audit requests, we invoice what we quote.

Our high degree of flexibility makes the best options available to you

Through our membership of Baker Tilly International we are able to provide premier accounting, assurance, tax and specialist business advice worldwide, drawing on internationally recognised industry and service line experts in 147 countries.

Each of the network’s member firms is independent and autonomous. However, we have chosen to work together, resulting in strong professional relationships and efficient collaboration.

Baker Tilly International member firms demonstrate a high professional standard, as well as a strong commitment to the network’s core values of integrity, leadership, transparency and ethics. Each member firm offers outstanding personal service combined with the expertise, strength and resources of a truly global network to support you as you grow regionally and globally.

For more information, visit www.bakertilly.global

However, we have significant flexibility in how we work. We make all our decisions locally, and given our wide ranging experience, we are able to adapt to situations quickly and deliver to our client needs, not around strictly enforced corporate models.