Robust internal financial controls can reduce the risk of fraud and make your business processes more effective. Solid systems will also make sure you have accurate, digestible information to hand when it comes to making crucial decisions.

Our team is made up of business process, financial and IT risk professionals. We will help you move away from time-consuming manual processes, outdated technology and unnecessary control procedures. We’ll identify and assess your current solutions, and recommend improved, efficient systems and processes that add real value to your business.

Whether you are embarking on a UK listing, US listing or seeking to improve your internal controls over financial reporting, we can help you improve the effectiveness of your internal controls.

Our internal controls and SOX services lift the burden from your staff. Not only can we identify your financial reporting risks, but we can also develop the most efficient way to address your controls needs. We provide a tailored approach that meets your specific internal controls and SOX compliance needs, through implementation, year one and ongoing compliance.

By adopting a risk-based approach to the scoping, delivery and evaluation of your internal financial reporting compliance programme, we can support you in driving down costs and enhancing controls’ effectiveness.

Through our risk advisory team, we can support you with the following internal financial controls procedures:

• Gap analysis – our team will work with you to assess your internal controls framework against accepted standards, highlighting and prioritising those areas that need enhancing to meet your goals and future reporting requirements.
• Project support for your implementation and compliance programme – we are experienced in the end-to-end process of meeting SOX. Our team provides project management, scoping, delivery and evaluation of outcomes. We will help you avoid compliance pitfalls, minimise impact on the business and manage the cost of compliance.
• Establishing minimum control standards – our team can advise on the key controls you should have in place across your business, entities and systems. We carry out a review to identify where you have the appropriate key financial and IT controls in place, before creating a clear remediation plan to bridge any gaps.
• In-depth review of processes – we will carry out an end-to-end walkthrough of each process, identifying sources of data and how it is analysed/manipulated, and reporting the final output. Our team can identify control points and assess whether they are appropriate. Where controls are not in place, or are not designed appropriately, we will work with you to set out a remediation plan.
• Process flow preparation – we can carry out a review to map out your processes, so that you can visualise them. This approach highlights gaps in controls, as well as opportunities for process improvement.
• Develop best practice control frameworks – our team can review your existing control framework and highlight opportunities for automation and improved efficiencies.
• Control testing – to support ongoing controls compliance and reporting on effectiveness, for example under SOX, we can deliver controls testing programmes on any in-house activities using our financial and IT controls expertise.

Find out more about how we can help you set up or evaluate your internal financial controls. Get in touch with Jed Turnbull or Shingo Soga to find out more.