An audit of your company records involves cost and inconvenience and is part of the price paid for trading as a limited company. Careful planning, however, can minimise these disadvantages and your audit does give us an excellent opportunity to discuss your business with you.
Reduce audit costs
- File your invoices and correspondence in order.
- Record and analyse all your cash and bank transactions.
- Reconcile your bank analysis book with your bank statements.
- Reconcile PAYE and VAT account balances with amounts due to the Collector-General.
- List your year end creditors and agree with your Creditors Control Account.
- List your year end debtors and agree with your Debtors Control Account.
- List your fixed asset additions and disposals made during the year.
Accurate records
Ensure that:
- All income is recorded and banked promptly.
- All recorded expenses are authorised and valid.
- All your recorded debts are recoverable.
- All your liabilities are identified and recorded when they are incurred.
Don’t be shy. Ask us what you can do to help you control the cost of the engagement. Make life easy for the audit/accounting team. Spend the extra time before we arrive to make sure that the books are balanced and accounts are analysed and reconciled. Do you really want to pay us to go through your files looking for information or make a schedule your bookkeeper didn’t have time to do?
Identify large, unusual or complicated transactions during the year and discuss them with us if you are unsure of the correct accounting treatment. Make a copy of the information at that time and keep it in a file for the year end audit. Keep copies of all equipment purchases, new leases, contracts and legal agreements.
Designate someone on your staff as the primary contact to fulfil supplementary documentation requests and answer questions. We know we are a pain, but the quicker you get us out of there, the less of a disruption we will be.
Take care of your finance and accounting personnel. Strong, technically competent accountants are more difficult than ever to find. Encourage them to keep professionally current.
Information
Do your records give you adequate information for taking management decisions?
You should know:
- The return you are obtaining from your investment in the business.
- Whether you will be able to meet your liabilities as and when they fall due.
- The extent to which you could attract or increase outside finance.
- Your fast and slow moving stock lines.
- The levels of gross profit from your product lines.
- The extent to which additional working capital will be required to finance an expansion of your business.
Reliable financial statements are critical for helping you manage your business, and reporting results to creditors, investors and others in a consistent universally understood manner. If you implement these simple suggestions, it should help you to reduce costs.
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Related Article: 10 Ways to Increase Your Profit
Please call Noel Murphy today on 021-4310266 if you need further information on making the most of your annual audit or a consultation.