Private Equity Audit
The audit, approached differently
Being a PE house or acquired by private equity changes the focus, objectives and speed of execution for management teams. This requires a different approach to the audit.
We train our teams differently to deliver an audit that is unique – they think like investors, focussing on retaining the high-quality audit and in turn safeguarding value.
Our Audit approach/methodology
The Enhanced PE backed audit is not a sales pitch, it’s the fundamentally different way that we do our audits, with an approach starting with the valuation model, performed by teams trained in private equity. This allows us to not only deliver a better quality audit, but one relevant to protecting shareholder value, providing rich insight to the finance team and shareholders.
Audit fundamentals
The highest quality audit challenge to build confidence in the financials.
Key features of our approach:
- A robust, high quality audit approach.
- Consideration of key controls that protect the backbone of your business value are incorporated into our audit.
- Each year we provide our views on the quality of key controls and processes through our reporting. We will provide realistic and pragmatic recommendations for any insights we raise on your control environment.
- A core commitment of the Enhanced PE backed audit is to not only provide you with the highest quality assurance over your track record, but to also provide insight in areas such as accounting policies, controls and governance matters that could detrimentally impact the quality and accuracy of your data, either now or in the future. This insight will be provided on an annual basis and will include progress against those insights raised in the previous year.
Drivers of valuation
Mapping the drivers of the valuation model to the financial statements to bring challenge to the areas that matter.
Key features of our approach:
- Materiality is normally based on normalised EBITDA for PE backed companies.
- A focus on judgements and policies which underpin the quality of reported EBITDA that are likely to be challenged upon diligence – including exceptional items, revenue recognition, capitalisation of costs, provisions and working capital.
- An assessment of the presentation and judgement of specific expenditures and other judgements.
- Focus on debt-like items towards exit.
