Banking
Credit loss provisioning and expected loss models, prudential ratios, valuation of financial instruments, anti-money-laundering frameworks and banking internal control.
Sectors
Fourteen sectors, fourteen accounting grammars.
Each sector brings its own operating cycle, regulation and risk areas, and imposes its own accounting treatments. These are the sectors in which the firm works regularly.
Why it matters
Accounting technique does not transfer from one sector to another.
An auditor new to a sector spends most of the engagement understanding what the client's teams are explaining, and the remainder testing secondary points. They cannot see where the risk sits, because they do not yet know where that sector habitually goes wrong.
Sector knowledge shortens the familiarisation phase and moves the effort to where it produces something: revenue recognition in construction, credit loss provisioning in banking, decommissioning costs in extractives, expenditure eligibility on donor funding. That is what separates a useful audit from a formal one.
Our sectors
The issues we handle, sector by sector.
Insurance
Adequacy of technical provisions, ring-fencing and matching of liabilities, revenue recognition on multi-year contracts, solvency requirements.
Construction
Percentage-of-completion accounting and reliability of work certificates, retentions, provisions for losses to completion, treatment of variations and claims.
Power and utilities
Heavy fixed assets and useful lives, power purchase agreements, capital grants, technical and non-technical network losses.
Hospitality
Seasonality and cut-off, management and franchise agreements, royalties, separation of operations from real estate, deferred income.
Mining
Treatment of exploration and development costs, site restoration provisions, mining royalties, ore inventories and work in progress.
Water
Public service delegation and returnable assets, concessional financing, asset renewal, collection and customer arrears.
Oil & gas
Production sharing contracts, recoverable costs, decommissioning and restoration provisions, accounting for exploration costs.
Pharmaceuticals
Research and development costs, rebates, discounts and returns, inventory traceability and impairment, regulatory compliance of flows.
Revenue reconciliation (EITI)
Reconciliation of flows declared by states and by extractive companies, definition of scope and materiality thresholds, analysis and explanation of differences.
Public sector
Budget execution and public accounting, control over the expenditure chain, state and agency assets, assessment under the PEFA framework.
Donor-funded projects
World Bank, European Union and KfW procedures, expenditure eligibility, justification of disbursements, annual and closing audits.
NGOs
Traceability of restricted funding, segregation of resources by donor, implementation reporting, compliance with grant agreements.
Air transport
Loyalty programmes and deferred income, heavy maintenance and major check provisions, airport charges, ticket revenue recognition.
Out of respect for professional confidentiality, the firm does not disclose the names of its clients.
Our method
How sector knowledge translates into an engagement.
Mapping the cycle
Identifying the operating cycle specific to the sector and the points at which financial information is actually created.
Specific risks
Listing the sensitive accounting treatments and the areas where this sector typically produces misstatements.
Tailored programme
Building a work programme calibrated to those risks, rather than applying a generic template uniformly.
Usable reporting
Conclusions expressed in the sector's own vocabulary, usable by operational teams and not only by the finance function.
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