Financial reporting advisory

Current market challenges

Corporate reporting is the window into the culture of your organisation. Recent years have seen stronger emphasis being placed on quality, with tighter regulations and rising demands from investors and other stakeholders.

The recent audit reform proposals are increasing directors’ accountability over dividends and distributable reserves and are seeking to build stakeholder confidence through enhanced resilience reporting, particularly as a result of long-term threats and challenges. Additionally, the intensifying change in stakeholder demand for businesses to report on wider environmental and social matters is the greatest it has ever been.

Specific challenges over and above the annual demands faced by finance directors and finance teams:

• The time pressures and technical expertise constraints from dealing with transactional-based projects on top of the regular annual reporting process
• The ongoing challenge of keeping up to date with new standards and amendments issued by the UK and international accounting standards bodies
• The difficulties in understanding and interpreting and implementing the accounting and legislative requirements, particularly when faced with practical complexities
• Detailed attention to provide transparent and cohesive narrative reporting that conveys a balanced and comprehensive story of the business

How we can help

We have a dedicated Accounting Technical Services team, whose purpose is to assist clients with understanding and applying regulatory and accounting requirements, both for front-end reporting purposes and within the financial statements.

As a client-facing technical team, we are renowned for our practical approach when facing complex technical accounting issues, and are committed to ensuring that technical accounting issues are addressed as early as possible in order to minimise last-minute surprises.

The team covers two core service areas:

• Accounting and financial reporting advisory; and
• Narrative reporting advisory.

We provide a variety of services to help support all your accounting and financial reporting needs, including:

• Accounting technical papers
• Consolidation support
• Business acquisitions and group reorganisations
• Finance director and secondment support
• Financial statement preparation and compliance reviews
• Bespoke training and technical updates
• Transaction support, including flotation support

We guide you through the challenges and complexities to meet your narrative reporting obligations advising on:

• Purpose, business model, and strategy description, and tying this to the effects on your key stakeholders
• Section 172 reporting
• Identifying key non-financial inputs, selecting and designing key performance indicators (KPIs), and the acceptability of APMs to investors
• Integrated reporting
• ESEF reporting
• Non-financial information statements and other non-financial information
• Corporate governance reporting in public, AIM-listed, and private companies
• Environmental and social reporting, including streamlined energy and carbon reporting, TCFD reporting, and sustainability reporting

Below we share two recent case studies in which we provided accounting technical support to large companies, all operating across various locations and jurisdictions, and covering the financial services sector.

Read more about our insurance services