News & Blog

In his blog our CEO shares personal insights from a career in accounting and tech  The key to successful implementation of new technology and the related change has never been about how great the technology was. Although implementing great technology is far easier…  The key has instead been change management. Big or small, changing anything…

In his blog our CEO shares personal insights from a career in accounting and tech  Two interactions in recent days sparked my thinking for this week’s blog. The first was with a new contact in Australia. In our first interaction he shared his firm’s resourcing challenges. A quite common pain-point for firms across the world….

In his blog our CEO shares personal insights from a career in accounting and tech  Analytics in audit and accounting is not a new phenomenon in principle. Those working in the profession for long enough will recall multiple earlier incarnations. Indeed, when my Inflo co-founder Graham Clark and I first worked together at PwC we…

In his blog our CEO shares personal insights from a career in accounting and tech  When considering future skills, we often hear that accountants in practice need to become proficient in areas such as data science and coding. But is that true?  It depends.  At a firm level, it’s a choice. The Big 4 are…

In his blog our CEO shares personal insights from a career in accounting and tech The audit and accounting profession is awash with forecasts of the impending doom of the role of the accountant. AI will automate everything. You must quickly embrace advisory work. Yesterday.   But is that true? Or the work of those trying…

In the spirit of continual improvement, there are always lessons to be learned and benefits to be gained from debriefing an audit engagement. While many teams focus internally on execution effectiveness, involving the client in the debrief process demonstrates the investment in improving the whole audit experience. Metadata regarding engagement performance can provide important insights…

External confirmations provide robust third-party evidence over balances within an organisation’s financial statements. However, all too often a lack of transparency across the confirmations process causes issues in obtaining requested confirmations. This ineffectiveness causes alternative procedures to be required late in the audit process. As a critical test, the confirmation of bank balances, debt balances…

There are limited opportunities for you to deliver tangible outputs from audit services. Beyond meeting formal reporting requirements, client reports offer the ability for you to articulate the work being performed and the value of the audit to clients. Traditional outputs can be enhanced through incorporating visualisations within reports, offering you an opportunity to tell…

Considering the nature of the balance or class of transactions to be tested against the defined risks is key to an efficient and quality audit approach. Where available, client knowledge accumulated in prior years can be a valuable aid to this. But an over reliance on previous approaches can be inhibiting and auditors should employ…

Rarely do accounting firms employ only a single technology for the delivery of services to clients. The existence of disparate, disconnected tools creates inefficiencies and more broadly causes a lack of confidence in data used to perform different accounting services. Access to structured data underlying an organisation’s financial statements changes this dynamic. You can map…