My job is to understand your question, then put a defensible number behind it.

Background

My working life has been in accounting and finance, at the practical end of it: ledgers that did not reconcile, month-ends that ran late, costing that nobody had ever tested, and owners making significant commitments on numbers they did not fully trust. That is the environment this practice is built for, because it is the one most small businesses are actually in.

I am an ACCA candidate, working through the qualification that underpins the discipline behind the work — financial reporting, management accounting, performance management, audit and assurance, financial management. It matters here because the difference between an interesting observation and a number you can defend to a bank, a buyer or your own team is exactly what that syllabus is about.

Audit, accounting and financial reporting

Internal audit for smaller and family-owned businesses

The businesses that would benefit most from an independent look at their own processes are the ones almost never offered it. Internal audit is sold to large organisations, in language built for large organisations, at prices that assume one.

A small or family-owned company is not a smaller version of a corporation, and treating it like one produces a policy manual nobody follows. The realities are different:

• Roles overlap because they have to. The person who raises the invoice also chases it and banks the payment. Telling a team of five to separate their duties is not advice, it is arithmetic they cannot do.
• Approval is a conversation, not a system. Things get agreed in a corridor and entered afterwards, so the record of who approved what often does not exist.
• Owner and company money blur. Drawings, personal expenses through the business, a vehicle used for both — normal, and worth documenting before someone else asks about it.
• Related parties are everywhere. A supplier owned by a cousin, premises rented from a family trust, a loan between two of the owner’s companies — none of it improper, all of it needing to be visible and priced properly.
• Succession has never been modelled. The business depends on one or two people, and nobody has worked out what happens financially if either stops.

The work is to find the few controls that genuinely reduce risk at your size — usually three or four, not thirty — and to say plainly which risks you are choosing to live with. A compensating control an owner will actually perform beats a perfect one they will not.

How the work usually goes

An owner arrives with a symptom — “we grew and there is less cash”, “I think two clients lose us money”, “I do not know if our prices are right”. The first job is to turn that into a question that has an answer: what exactly are we measuring, over what period, against what alternative.

The second job is the unglamorous one — getting to figures that hold up. That often means rebuilding analysis your accounting system never produced, from records you already have. The third is the part that matters: saying plainly what the numbers mean, what you should do about it, and what it is worth in money.

What I care about in an engagement

• An amount, not an adjective. Every finding carries a figure — cash, margin or risk exposure. “This could be better” is not a deliverable.
• Workings you can inspect. You get the schedules behind every number, so anyone on your side can check them or take them over.
• A decision at the end. If a piece of analysis would not change what you do, it does not belong in the report.
• No dependency. I am not trying to become something you cannot leave. Work I do is documented so your team, or your accountant, can carry it on.